The Parachutist
by Camilla10
Summary: It is 1943 and WW II is devastating Europe. The young American parachutist Edward Masen is sent by the OSS on a secret mission in Northern Italy. There he meets a girl concealing a terrible secret. They fall passionately in love and plan to marry when the war ends. However, while returning to the Allied lines, Edward meets two Volturi warriors...
1. Chapter 1 Operation Avalanche

**The Parachutist, by Camilla****10**

Summary

It is 1943 and WW II is devastating Europe. Edward Masen is a 23 years old American parachutist sent by the OSS on a secret mission, meant to help the partisans fighting the Nazis in Northern Italy. There he meets a girl concealing a terrible secret. They fall passionately in love and plan to marry as soon as Italy is liberated. However, while going back to the Allied lines and trying to reach Anzio, where the Anglo American forces are struggling to break through Germans' opposition, Edward finds his nemesis, in the form of two Volturi warriors.

Edward is now a newborn vampire, fierce, desperate and bloodthirsty. Will he succumb forever to his inner monster or will he be able to recover at least some of his lost humanity? Will he see his love again and resist the urge to kill her?

Story notes:

Stephenie Meyer owns the characters. The plot is mostly mine.

I have to thank a lot of people for their help in developing the story, adding historical details and editing. In Europe they are: my husband, my mother in law, who risked her life in the Resistance, Alberto, the 2 Giovanni, Lanfranco, Maria Teresa, Luisa, Rosa, Patrizia, Giuliana, Ginevra, Ippolito and Adrian. Over the Ocean I have to name JShay, Master of the Boot, Serendipitous and Geoph (for all things military). Stefanie is my wonderful Beta.

This is an AU story, and the M rating is well earned, both for sex and violence.

In The parachutist the Germans are going to be the enemy, and the feelings expressed about them (not only the Nazis, all Germans) by various characters mirror the ones expressed at the time by those who – with good reasons - fought them. I want to add that my long experience with Friends of the Earth Europe confirms that present day Germans are one of the nicer and most democratic people I know.

The story is almost entirely written in Edward's PoV, with a few exceptions, which will be indicated. When there is no indication, it is Edward's.

Chapter 1 Operation Avalanche

The German soldier emits just a low gurgle when Caputo slits his throat. The other German, the one I felled with my useless carbine's butt, is still breathing, however. Caputo gives me a very hard stare, then proceeds to do what I am obviously reluctant to do myself and dispatches him. I try not to wince and help my comrade to bury the bodies under a pile of rubble inside the bombed house.

So far, so good. We climb to the second floor, from where we can see if somebody is coming, and prepare for a long wait. He passes the canteen to me and we both drink. It is hot and nightfall is still very far away. Obviously, Joe Caputo believes I am a pansy, and I wonder what he would think if he knew that I play the piano too. At least I used to. He is from Trenton, New Jersey, a place where real men, and particularly the ones of Italian descent, surely don't play the piano. They might own a car repair shop, like Joe's parents, or pursue other manly professions. However, he has decided that he will be my protector till we get back to the lines. If we do get back to the lines, that is. We have lost contact with the rest of our platoon, and we fear that many are now dead or captured.

I wonderwhat my problem is. At the beginning of Operation Avalanche a few days ago, when we were parachuted over Avellino, I went about my pathfinder job quite coolly, ignoring the fact that after a while our small group, the first to be dropped, was discovered and fired upon.

This is my first war action. When we were sent to North Africa I did not participate in Operation Torch, as I was asked to give extra training to new recruits, and I was not selected for the disastrous El Djem mission. Then, during the landing in Sicily, the 509th was held in reserve.

In Avellino we soon realized that a full panzer division had positioned itself between us and the rest of the landed Anglo-American army. I fought, trying to save my life and that of my comrades, and to inflict damage, if I could. I have surely killed, watched enemy soldiers fall under my shots. But to cut somebody's throat in cold blood is an obscenely intimate act, and I found I could not stomach it, despite my training.

Those two Germans under the pile of rubble had been exactly where we ourselves wanted to be, inside a ruined house that would be perfect in which to wait for the night and then run down from the back of the building into a small valley that was well covered by bushes and trees. From there, Ciro had assured us, we could find the shortcut allowing us to bypass the Panzerdivision and reach our lines undetected.

So we decided to dispose of them. I lured the two enemy soldiers out of the building by speaking their language. They came out, and I took the first down with the butt of my carbine, while Caputo crept behind the other.

"How come you speak German?" Caputo now asks me.

"My late maternal grandmother was Austrian," I answer "and she insisted I learn the language." What would my Oma think of me being here now, fighting the enemy of her most famous countryman, whom, since the Anschluss, she had hated and despised from the depth of her heart? She would probably be very happy, but very concerned for my safety, too.

And she would have reason to be. If it had not been for Ciro, I would be dead by now. Our platoon had been ambushed by a much larger enemy force. We were pinned to a wall, answering to the fire, but clearly succumbing. Caputo and I were near the corner of the wall encircling a farm house, crouching behind a broken hand cart. A whispering voice had called us in dialect: "_America, venite cu 'mmia,"_ telling us to follow him. And, miraculously, we had been able to turn around the corner unseen and follow the farmer, Ciro, who drew us inside through a gate. "_Trasite int'o pozzo"_ he had said, indicating the well and giving us a straw each, mimicking the action of breathing through it.

So we went into the well, relatively easy to descend into due to many protruding stones, and slid under the dark water, carbines and everything, The water was shoulder deep. When we heard German voices we ducked also our heads in, breathing through the straws.

We remained there a very long time, frozen by the cold water, until Ciro came for us, after the Germans had long gone.

In the following days, brave beyond belief, Ciro had concealed us, fed us, lent us something to put on while our uniforms and equipment dried, the carbines and pistols probably ruined. It was clear that we had no other course now than try to go back, as indeed our engagement rules dictated, namely saying that, when one or two soldiers lost contact with their comrades and could not fight effectively anymore, they should try to avoid capture and find their way back to their lines.

Finally, when night comes Caputo and I leave the bombed house from a back window and go down the slope, starting to run when we are under the tree cover. Ciro has given us very clear instructions, describing our road to safety perfectly. At a certain point, however, Caputo stumbles and falls, uttering a string of profanities. A sharp, nasty metal wire has cut through his boot. He manages to rise again and, limping slightly, resumes his run at a slower pace.

We march all night and some of the following day. Finally, thirsty and famished, we hear voices. We approach cautiously, concealed behind some bushes and, thank God, they are speaking in English. We have made it!

We report to Headquarters, eventually, and we are told vaguely to wait for further orders, and then we are dismissed. It is not surprising to learn that the 509th has had heavy losses and even our Commander is missing in action, dead or captured. It is highly probable that now our battalion will have to be re-organized.

Finally, Joe has the time to attend to his injured foot. It appears immediately that the situation is worse than he thought. His boot is full of dried blood, and he can't even take it off to assess the damage.

I help him to the nearest field hospital, as he now has serious troubles walking.

"You are lucky," says the orderly while I wait. "Doctor Frankenstein is in; he is the best." He uses the disconcerting nickname with affection, as he adds. "Poor guy, had a terrible accident when a container of acid fell on him. His eyes were spared, but his face and the back of his hands..." He shudders. "But still he volunteered..."

A lot of time passes, and finally a doctor comes out and walks toward me. I salute and try to keep my face expressionless. Indeed, his eyes were spared and they are a beautiful light brown, like dark honey. But the face is a hideous mess, despite the efforts done to put it together again. It is covered in scars, some puckered, others unnaturally smooth, like milk skim.

"At ease," he says, his voice soft and melodious. You are a friend of Lieut. Caputo?

"Yes, Sir," I answer, identifying myself, "we just came back from Avellino."

"Congratulations," he says. "It must have been though. I am Captain Cullen, and I have just amputated two toes from your friend's right foot. He will walk again, eventually, but his parachuting days are at an end, I am afraid. He is sedated now, but please, come back to visit him, if you can. He is not very happy."

I say that I'll do it, salute and leave the hospital, going in search of something to eat.

Chapter endnotes

What is Capt. Carlisle Cullen, who is the vampire we know, doing in Salerno in 1943 and what happened to his face? Don't worry, it will all be explained. In the meanwhile, please, leave me a review.

A panzer division was an armored division in the German Army. These divisions usually consisted of one tank regiment, two motorized infantry regiments (including one mechanized battalion), an artillery regiment, and several support battalions (reconnaissance, anti-tank, anti-aircraft, engineers, etc). _Source: Wikipedia_

A pathfinder is a paratrooper who is dropped at the very beginning of an action, in order to set up and operate drop zones, pickup zones, and helicopter landing sites for airborne operations, air resupply operations, or other air operations in support of the ground unit commander. Pathfinders use a wide array of skills, including air traffic control, ground-to-air communications, sling load operations and inspections, and drop zones in order to ensure the mission is a success.

The Anschluss (German for "link-up"), was the 1938 incorporation of Austria into Greater Germany by Hitler.

Oma means granny in German.

All I know about Trenton NJ comes from the wonderful novels of Janet Evanovich. This is my homage to her and I hope it does not offend anybody.


	2. Chapter 2 Avoiding the casino

**The Parachutist by Camilla10**

Chapter note

The parachutist was nominated for the Indie Twific award in the category Canon or AU story that knocks you off your feet – Work in progress. I am beyond excited and of course I hope that you will vote for it. First round of voting will be between February 20th and March 2nd. By that time on the Indie website there will be indications on how to vote, I am sure. I'll post more info as soon as I have it. The Indie link is .com

Chapter 2 Avoiding the _casino_

Now that Salerno has been conquered, followed by Naples, I am living a sort of suspended life, while the powers that be decide what is going to happen to the 509th. I have problems of my own, because I now realize that being a pathfinder, something I trained for and like doing, isn't going to shield me from typical commando actions, once I am dropped. I have been trained in hand-to-hand combat but, after the experience in Avellino, I know that I may hesitate to use a knife, which could mean my death, or to be branded a coward.

I almost envy Caputo, no, I do envy him. He is out of this shit. Not that he has taken the loss of his two toes well. So, if our circumstances were reversed, you would have two happy parachutists, instead of two miserable ones. I go to see him frequently, trying to cheer him up, and so today also I am visiting the field hospital, bringing him some magazines I fished around for; one in particular, called "Beauty Parade", is full of pin up's photos I am sure he will relish. He is not interested in books.

I tell him that everybody in our barracks is off-duty, and everyone but me has gone out to sample the amenities that Salerno can offer. Amenities that I don't need to describe in detail, he knows where most of our comrades have gone. To the _casino_, as legal and state controlled whorehouses are called in Italy. He might be grateful that I have come to see him instead, but it all confirms his concept of me being a pansy. Well, whatever.

When I am leaving, I find Captain Cullen sitting on a bench outside the hospital, smoking. I salute, but he waves away all military formalities and invites me to sit with him. I notice the extreme elegance with which he wears his uniform, not a crease on him, He has gloves on and I notice his very good scent. Ah, he uses perfume. Well, when your face is hideous to look at, you have to compensate in some way, I suppose. He offers me a cigarette, which I politely refuse. I don't smoke; another petal of my pansy character.

"So, how come you have not gone to town with your comrades?" He asks.

OK, I am tired of being misinterpreted, so I decide to answer his question bluntly."Whores do not appeal to me." His lips, which also have been spared by the acid and are quite red among the pale scars, distend in a grin."Fine, you should not be ashamed of it."

"I am not ashamed," I answer, "only, it makes people think I am not normal." I have never been so open with anybody since I enlisted in the Army, but there is something compelling about this doctor, something that rejects evasions and meaningless talk.

"Well, I might not be normal also," he says "because my wife, whom I adore, has been the first and the only woman for me."

He has understood me completely, my need of not separating love and sex… and my determination to wait until I can have both. I am amazed by his frankness, and also appalled. He adores his wife… how do they manage the fact that his face is a ruined mess? Can a loving woman overcome this? Of course I can't ask him, and, anyway, he changes track and asks me about my choice to be a parachutist.

"I was already parachuting for hobby, or sport, if you like," I answer, "so when I decided to volunteer it was a natural follow-up.

"It must have been different in the army, though," he observes.

"Yes, "I confirm, recalling my first experiences at Fort Bragg. "When you are parachuting for sport, you try to drop as slowly as possible, while in a war action you are meant to land as quickly as possible. You need to get going as you are a sitting duck while you are floating. For this reason the parachute is smaller. Plus, I had to learn to jump from the plane door using the static line and also to jump from the hatch in the plane floor, while, as a civilian, I was used to drop alone and not from military planes, of course. And paratroopers have to carry a lot of equipment, too. But I was OK, seen my previous experience. For inexperienced people, a three weeks training is not a lot."

As I don't like to brag, I don't tell him of my nickname "Banana Masen" referring to the fact that I always manage to execute a perfect 'banana roll' when landing, whatever the burdens I have to carry with me. Of course the nickname leads my comrades to add a lot of innuendos that have nothing to do with parachuting, but I have learned to take them in my stride.

"Were you at the university before enlisting?" he asks.

"No, Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia" I say, and shut up. This is cutting too near to the bone. He is also silent and lights another cigarette. But the damage is done. It all comes back to me: waking up in the hospital with a slight concussion and minor bruises, the compassionate lies, until finally I was told the truth: My parents were dead. And it was my fault.

A so-called precocious musical genius and certainly a spoiled brat. That is what I was. Giving my first piano concert at 14, while continuing my musical studies. My parents worshipped me; I could have had whatever I wanted. When I discovered parachuting, I was allowed to practice it, despite their fears. My father paid for everything and often drove me to the different airfields, until he bought me a car. And I did not want to miss a thing. The night of the accident I had played at Allegheny College in Meadville but, the morning after I wanted to participate to an informal parachuting competition near Philadelphia again. Therefore we did not stay another night in the hotel after the concert, like it would have been reasonable, but my father set himself to drive the over 300 miles needed to take me where I had to go, insisting that I slept on the back seats. Of course he was also tired, so he must have lost control of the car.

I was devastated. My greed for enjoyment had brought this on. The loss of my mother, a loving, warm friend before being a parent, has been the hardest thing to bear. She knew all my secrets, including the random telepathy episodes I was subjected to occasionally and that nobody else knew about. And my father was the rock on which my very life was pinned. They had gone and left me stranded.

Now I was a rich orphan, alone in the world and free to do whatever I pleased. Problem was, nothing pleased me anymore, so I lived aimlessly for months. I thought I was not going to be free until I atoned, and it seemed to me at the time that the thing I should lay on my parents' tomb was the thing I loved most. Music. Contemporary events helped. After Pearl Harbor I left Curtis and volunteered.

And now I am sitting here, near this disfigured surgeon with the beautiful eyes and the melodious voice. A voice that calls me out of my unpleasant reverie. "How was it in Avellino?" He asks me. I tell him. In fact I tell him everything, till I reach the moment Joe Caputo had slit the second German's throat while I was paralyzed.

He turns his head and looks at me intently. There is this unspoken question I have not asked, but which he seems to understand perfectly. "Don't believe for a moment you are a coward," he tells me "only, there are different kinds of courage. Listen," he asks, "do you perchance speak Italian?"

Surprised by the abrupt change of subject, I answer that I do. As music scores and so many things in the musical field are in Italian, I had decided to study the language and became fluent enough. "Would you be interested in a solitary mission in Northern Italy?" He asks, surprising me again. "A rather hush-hush thing, I believe. It is dangerous, but it should not involve commando action. You have the right profile for it. I am sorry that I cannot tell you more. If you say yes, I'll pass the information along and you could be called. Then you will be told what it is all about."

I say yes immediately. I feel reprieved. After a while, I salute him and go back to my barracks. I am elated and cannot wait to be called. I hope it happens.

Chapter endnotes

Now we know better Edward's personality and what brought him to Italy. I am trying to keep him in canon, despite the very different circumstances; he is his usual guilt ridden self, chaste and pensive. And he has a latent mind reading gift. But, how funny, he has a problem with spilling blood. This might change, unfortunately. Please, tell me what you think.-

The _casini,_ or C_ase di Tolleranza_, as Italian legal and State controlled whorehouses were called, were abolished in 1958. It was considered a victory of the progressive parties, in the name of women's dignity. It is debatable if today's prostitutes, out in the streets with no protection, exposed to their clients' possible perversions and exploited by their pimps, when not enslaved by criminal organizations, fare much better than the_ segnorine_ of a long time ago. I doubt it.

The **banana roll**, a nickname for the correct landing of a paratrooper, will be described in a following chapter.

OK, beloved readers, I researched about parachuting and the correct words for it. (to skydive, for instance, is a verb that only came to be used many years after WW II.) It is an issue of which I know zilch, both in Italian and in English. If I made mistakes, forgive me.


	3. Chapter 3 The mission

**The Parachutist by Camilla10**

Chapter notes

I hope you are not too bored by my endnotes and read them. I try to make them as lively as I can and they are part of the story too, because they give essential background. Plus, it is possible that many of the things I refer to are not common knowledge today.

Chapter 3 - Mission

I am driving to Naples. The provisionary commander of the 509th sent for me and told me that I was to go to the OSS headquarters in Via Crispi, and present myself to one Colonel Peter Thompson. It is urgent, so I even got wheels.

I find my way in a city still recovering from recent German bombings and wanton destruction, which followed our bombing. I have to stop frequently in the crowded streets, and then I have to fend off swarms of skinny boys who have old eyes and try to jump into my Jeep, asking for chewing gum, chocolate, cigarettes and offering me in pidgin English their sisters, 'very clean', their older brothers, themselves, booze, clandestine card games, and anything else I might desire.

Their antics would be hilarious, if they weren't tragic. Rumor has it that American soldiers are on sale. That is, if one of those boys, or _scugnizzi,_ as they are called in dialect, manages to secure one for the day, bringing him around to pursue the pleasures the soldier is prepared to pay for, he then has to compensate the other boys for the privilege.

I reprimand them in Italian, and that awes them. Finally I get to my destination, show my papers and am allowed in, parking inside the courtyard.

Colonel Thompson receives me and tells me that my name was suggested to him as a man willing to be dropped over Northern Italy on a mission. He asks me a number of general questions, then he comes to the point.

Obviously this all has to be on a need-to-know basis, so I am not told a lot. He is sifting through items, deciding what he must tell me. And here it is. In a few days from now a plane will bring me North and I will be parachuted at the feet of the Appennini mountains, near Bologna. I will be carrying a two way radio strapped to my body. It is destined to the partisan brigade _Lupo Rosso_, operating the area and considered strategically important by our Secret Services. The group had a radio, managed by an Italian operator working for the OSS, code name Mario, who was parachuted with it some time ago. That radio, however, started malfunctioning and eventually died on him. Now, while weapons, ammos and other supplies can be sent down with just a parachute attached, radios too often do not survive the drop. Hell, they sometimes do not survive the drop even when carried by a parachutist. I tell him that I mostly manage to land safely, so I hope I can ensure a good outcome.

The partisans will be on the drop site to meet me.

There is something else, though. This is a part that he obviously does not relish telling me, but he must. I have to communicate to the radio operator some information that should not go on the air, even if encoded.

"How is your memory?" he asks me. I tell him that I have an excellent, practically photographic, memory. I don't add that I have been trained since infancy to memorize scores of music.

So he gives me a sheet of paper containing the dates and areas where weapons and other supplies will be dropped to different partisans brigades operating on the Appennini in the Bologna and Modena provinces. There is one date and an alternative one for each drop. I can keep the sheet for now, but I must burn it before I am launched. Then I will recite everything to the radio operator, whom he already told me is an OSS agent. The agent will memorize the dates and places too and after that, by means of _staffette,_ local couriers, that is, he will let each brigade know when to expect its drop. OK, fine, but why he is so uncomfortable then?

He produces a small metal cigarette case and a Zippo. I have barely said that I don't smoke, when I understand that it is not the point. The small box holds eight cigarettes. One has been shortened, so that there is a secret cavity inside the holder. From another box on his desk he takes something fluffy. He delicately removes the cotton and I can see a tiny oval glass ampoule in the palm of his hand.

"German commando soldiers operating behind enemy lines carry these" he says, "and sometimes also the Brits. We don't, as a rule. But the information you will be carrying in your brain cannot become known by the enemy."

I look at the glass pill like it is a scorpion.

"Yes, it is cyanide," he confirms. "Listen, I don't believe you will have any trouble, it should be a safe drop. But, if you are captured and you have reason to fear interrogation and torture…to ask for a smoke is easy. You just have to crack it with your teeth. They say it is very quick. Of course, once the dates are expired and the drops done, the information will not be relevant anymore."

He wraps again the pill in cotton and puts it inside the cigarette case, adds the shortened cigarette and gives everything to me.

I gulp and put the cigarette holder and the Zippo in my pocket.

"Do bring cigarettes with you anyway," he tells me, "even if you don't smoke, they will be appreciated, where you are going."

Once I will have accomplished my mission, he adds, I should try to return, but not at risk of capture. The partisans will try to arrange a safe way, in the meanwhile I will remain with them.

So I get my heart's desire with a poisoned tail, but it is OK. Now I have only to memorize the information, pack and wait for the day. The OSS will send somebody to pick me up and take me to the airfield.

I salute the Colonel and drive back to Salerno.

It is time to say goodbye to Joe Caputo and to thank Captain Cullen. Joe is on his feet at last, limping. He is going to be sent back to the US with a Purple Heart. Finally he is adjusting to the idea of not being able to go parachuting anymore and he is not so miserable. We part very amicably, with vague promises to see each other again someday. After all, Trenton and Philadelphia are not that far from each other. Who knows?

I wait for Captain Cullen to end his shift.

We take a stroll. He tells me that he patched up one of Colonel Thompson's OSS buddies and so they struck a friendship of a sort. Thompson called him and asked him to fish around for perspective volunteers.

I know I should not speak of the mission, but the doctor knew of it before me, so I think I have some small latitude. And I am curious.

"You were right, Sir," I say "it was very hush-hush, and I cannot understand why, exactly.

"Ah, it has to do with politics," he answers me "not with intelligence. Let's say that there are somewhat different opinions between the OSS and its British counterpart the SOA. Basically, the British would prefer to help only the partisans that are monarchist, the ones responding to the King of Italy and his Minister Badoglio, that is. For our side, guerrilla effectiveness is the key. So it is becoming a little awkward to coordinate the actions in support of the partisans in Northern Italy. Near Bologna the brigades are mostly communist, or belong to _Giustizia and Libertà_, and both are republican. So your drop is not being advertised."

I am more than grateful to him for being so open. After all, my ass is on the line and I am happy to know the background. But, at the end of the day, all that is not really my concern.

While we slowly retrace our steps, he is silent. Dusk is coming. Suddenly I am hit by one of my telepathy episodes. Images came to me from his mind and they are so strange that I cannot really understand what they are about. He sees himself in a forest, behind a tall bush, completely still. Then there is movement and a big deer comes into view. He jumps on it and wrestles it to the ground. Incredibly, he has subjugated the animal. And then, and then, he lowers his mouth to the deer's neck and…Christ, what is he doing?

I don't see anything more. It has been so weird that I can only think that he is remembering some crazy dream of his and that is what I saw.

Going back to my barracks, I muse on my useless gift. Since puberty, I have gotten random glimpses of what people near me is thinking. I know that it is so, because it has happened to me to answer questions that had not been asked, much to my confusion and to other people's puzzlement. But I cannot predict when this will happen - not that it happens frequently anyway - and, more often than not, what I sense is totally irrelevant. I confided in my mother and she made me promise not to speak of it with anybody, lest I was considered a freak. Not even to my father, who would be too worried. She told me that I should try and not think about it, which is what I do.

Chapter endnotes

How do you feel so far? Tell me in a review, please. I hope you like human Edward, who has to have some more experiences before encountering his fate.

When leaving Naples the Nazis destroyed the town's sewage system, among other things.

As for the _scugnizzi_ and their pandering to American soldiers, that is also completely true. The journalist Curzio Malaparte wrote a terrible book about liberated Naples: "_La Pelle_" (The Skin).

There was a real Colonel Thompson in Via Crispi, but his surname was slightly different. (I have read his memories and they gave me the inspiration and details to make my story more credible). However, I am not attempting to write history here. Therefore I will not give names of real partisan brigades, or quote real episodes (The Battle of Lame Gate being an exception). I am telling the story of a fictional character in a realistic, but not real, context. But, the political disagreement between the US and the UK secret services and governments in relation to the Italian partisans did exist, and was damaging to the war effort.

The need for the parachutist used for the mission to speak Italian is not farfetched. In some cases interpreters were also dropped, imagine! At that time, very few people spoke English in Italy. French was the language taught in schools, followed by German, when the ties between the two countries tightened. (However, Italians are quite impervious to German!)

Finally, the _Staffette,_ mostly women, carried messages on behalf of the Resistance. This is what my mother in law did and eventually she was arrested by the SS. Of course she denied everything, passing herself off as a stupid socialite. Somehow they believed her and after 40 days in prison she was released.


	4. Chapter 4 The drop

**The ****parachutist, by Camilla10**

A/N As usual, a lot of thanks to Stefanie, my wonderful beta editor.

This story has been nominated for the **Indie TwiFic Awards** in the following category: WIP Canon or AU story that knocks you off your feet! Voting wil start after February 20th. If you like this story, please vote for it.

Chapter 4 - The drop

The _Dakota_ is descending steadily. It is a cloudy night, perfect. The idea is to plunge under the clouds at the last moment and drop the supplies and me at the same time. In this way it should be fast and hopefully we will be undetected.

The rush of adrenaline, constant even after I don't know how many drops, and the rush of the wind…the launch is anticipated and somebody has lit a circle of fires to guide me and the plane over the small valley which is my destination. It seems a very tiny circle from here, but the pilot is good and I think I am going to make it on target. I push the supplies outside, their parachute will open automatically and then I plunge. I fall and my parachute opens, giving me a sharp pull. Down, down, down, I am descending and here I come, doing my best to control my drop.

About to land now. OK, feet and knees together, legs slightly bent, elbows tight into the sides, chin on the chest and eyes open. Now, be sure to hit the ground correctly with the five points of contact: balls of feet, calf, thigh, buttocks, and the pull-up muscles… Oh, very well, 'Banana Masen' has managed another good landing, so the radio tied to my body in its protective padding has not been harmed in any way. Not even a small bump.

I look around. There is nobody in sight. It is impossible of course, somebody lit the fires. So what is it? Horrific visions I can't fight come unbidden. A trap, German soldiers coming out of the trees, the partisans have been slaughtered and I am about to be captured. Will they interrogate me? Will they know I am carrying sensitive information in my head? Will I really need to make them believe I am ready to spill, and then ask if I can smoke one of my cigarettes? Will I have the courage for it?

When you are terrified, the best thing you can do is to carry on with your routine. I proceed to fold my parachute after I have freed myself of it.

Then I hear a cry:"Lupo Rosso, Lupo Rosso!" Thank God. This is the name of the brigade I am supposed to meet. They come out in the clearing, a dozen of men, all but one with weapons that they sling over their shoulders. They are young and look lean and hungry, while the un-armed one is and older man, strong but portly.

"I have a present for Mario," I say in Italian.

"Grazie," one of the men answers, advancing. "I am Mario." So this is the radio operator. I free myself of my precious charge and give it to him.

"Do you have anything else for me?" He asks in English.

"Yes, I have to recite some poetry to you," I tell him.

We step aside, while the other men start collecting the supplies, folding the parachutes, dousing the fires, and finally burying the embers and the supply 'chutes. After a while the clearing is pitch black.

I tell Mario the information about the launches. He listens and then tries to repeat it. He is well trained, because he makes very few mistakes. We repeat the exercise a few times and at the end he has it. I am impressed. And then, finally, it downs on me. Of course this information should not go to the Germans, to the point that I should kill myself to prevent it. But it probably should not go to our British allies either. They would not be pleased to know that the OSS is supplying partisan brigades here, because those are not loyalist, but communist, or republican. This is the reason of the secrecy and explains why it has to go to Mario, an US agent, by word of mouth. Well, I am American too, so it is OK for me.

I see a little better now that my eyes have adjusted, but it is still very dark. I should bury my parachute, but the older man stops me.

"No, yours is still made of silk, isn't it? "Yes," I confirm.

"Then the women will want it."

In fact, since silk imports from China and Japan became difficult, most new parachutes are now being made of artificial fibers, but mine is still made of silk, and I know that they are coveted all over Europe, to make shirts, feminine underwear and even bridal gowns. I offer it to him.

"I am _Papà_ Morelli," he tells me. "You are to stay with me until we find a way to send you back. It will take a while."

So I follow him downhill, while all the other men start marching uphill, carrying the supplies with them. He has a flashlight that he keeps pointed to the ground.

It is a very long walk, and we have to go slowly, because I can barely see where I am putting my feet. It is almost dawn when we finally get to a farm, quite isolated, as far as I can fathom.

We go into the main building and the kitchen seems to me so bright that I have to blink a few times before I can take things in.

Apart from _Papà_ Morelli, there are three people in the room, women. I am introduced around. The older, Lidia, is his wife. The other two are daughters-in-law. The sons are not here. I suppose I have seen them in the clearing, but I am not told their names. Up there they must all have code names, like Mario has. The other women's names are Santina, who has a twelve-year-old boy, probably sleeping, as he is not here, then there is Ersilia, who I am told has two children. There is another daughter-in-law, Piera, but she is still nursing her firstborn baby and she sleeps when he sleeps. Then, they tell me, there is a niece, Isetta, whom I'll meet tomorrow.

I am offered a bowl of soup with some bread, which I wolf down. I had not realized how hungry I was, after the drop and the excitement that followed.

Morelli now shows me my sleeping quarters, which are not in the farm proper, but in the barn outside. He takes me there. As we slide open the door, I feel the movements and stirrings of the cows.

"There is no heating here," the farmer says, "but the cows will make up for it." And, indeed, the air inside is warm. Of course, it smells of manure, but it is not unpleasant. There is a loft, making up for half the length of the barn, and accessible by a ladder. We go up and at first I see only bales of straw and hay, but, following Morelli and his flashlight I find that a sort of room has been created, invisible from below, three of its walls made up with the bales. A narrow opening allows me in. The fourth wall is the barn itself, so I have the benefit of a window, with sturdy shutters. There is a plain single bed, just a wooden frame, with a straw mattress, already made up with clean sheets and blankets, a couple of stools and a rickety table.

Before leaving, Morelli tells me that there is a toilet outside the barn, while I can get water from the pump inside. He gives me the flashlight, but recommends that I use it as sparingly as possible and only when the barn's shutters are closed, like now. He knows the place like the back of his hand, evidently, because he goes down the ladder and leaves silently, without the benefit of a light.

So here I am, but I don't even know what here means exactly, severed from the battalion and the American army, my life in the hands of strangers. I should be concerned, worried even, but it is not so. I feel incredibly light and free in this hay and straw nest where I am meant to remain concealed for God knows how much time.

I reflect that since my parents died I have been running, from myself most of all. Now I am stalled and can finally rest. Maybe I'll even have the time to take stock of my life and decide what I'll do next, once the war ends. I shed my boots and lie on my hard bed, falling asleep in seconds

Chapter endnotes.

Yes, I know, short chapter, but it was the right place to stop and let Edward sleep (while he still can…). The next one will be much longer, I promise. I'll continue to update quickly if you tell me in a review that you are with me. A lot of interesting things are about to happen to our parachutist, by the way. Don' forget the niece, Isetta.

In a paragraph above you have the description of a banana roll.

Don't forget the silk parachute, by the way.

My late father in law was in the Resistance and was parachuted over Biella, in Piedmont, with other two people, one carrying a radio with him. But they were not expert parachutists, had only done a few test drops before, so he sprained an ankle and the radio broke. It happened often!

-------


	5. Chapter 5 Farm Hand

**The Parachutist, by Camilla10**

Chapter notes

Here Edward meets his soul mate.

In this chapter I drew from the memories of older relatives and friends to give a picture of what was life like in countryside Italy during the war. I hope you like it, and, if so, you tell me.

Chapter 5  Farm hand

I am adjusting to life in a farm, because it'll be a while before arrangements can be made to send me back to the Anglo-American lines. I understand that at a certain point in time a truck will travel south toward Rome, bringing food to a city experiencing penury. Its status of 'open city' – out of respect for the Pope - will allow for the trip, one that the Germans or the _Repubblichini_ , the fascist militia, will not stop. Concealed inside the truck I will reach Rome. Then I'll be on my own, trying to get to Naples. We are following the war news every night, listening to Radio Londra which, in Italian, tells us very different things from the official propaganda of the Social Republic. To listen to Radio Londra's programs, broadcasted from London and starting with the notes of Beethoven's 5th Symphony, is forbidden and could be severely punished, but everybody does it.

Very soon after my arrival I had to make a decision. Either I retained my uniform, but then I had to stay indoors, in the barn's loft all the time, or I could wear civilian garments, making me less conspicuous, and move around a little. But, if I was discovered and captured, I would be immediately shot as a spy, while in the first case I would have a war prisoner's status. For the family hosting me it would not make a difference. They would probably be shot in both cases. I am amazed by their courage.

Eventually I decide that I cannot stay cooped up for weeks, so I am given heavy and warm civilian clothes to wear, the trousers a little short. But in any case I have to stay in the farm, disappearing when anybody arrives. At night, different visitors come. Ones that descend from the mountains to deliver or receive messages, take provisions, gather intelligence. I sometime hear them arriving, but I stay put. They know I am here and If I am needed, I will be told.

It is obvious that the situation of the farm isn't good. The only man left is Papà Morelli, as his three sons are all with the partisans. Even if it is winter, there is work to be done and only women to do it, plus a twelve-year-old boy. They are awesome women, to be sure, and strong as horses, but I still I feel I should give a hand.

When I volunteer, it is decided that I should help with cow milking. Presently it is the task of Santina, the eldest son's wife, and of Isetta, the niece they are hosting, because her family wants to protect her from the heavy bombing our side is bestowing on Bologna. I can replace Santina, who can usefully do something else, and I will be milking with Isetta. I do not even need to go outside much, as already I am sleeping in the barn.

Of course I have never milked a cow before, but I hope to learn. To work with my hands is something I should experience, I believe, as I have been far too pampered in my life. Isetta will teach me and I am looking forward to it, because she is very pretty.

After some spilled milk (dammit), angry moos and a lot of laughter, I finally get the knack of it. So now we have a routine.

I wake up very early, go down the ladder and I wash myself using the barn's water pump. Toilets are outside and quite primitive, but they are kept clean. To take a bath is a rare treat, water has to be heated on the stove and then a zinc portable tub has to be filled. I have not found the courage to ask for it, so I make do with cold water. Frankly, not every day. Maybe I stink, but no more than anybody else. No, really, I feel a little ashamed about the easy life I have had so far. Not only at home, where it was to be expected, but even in the army there are hot showers, unless you are actually in the battlefield. It is not that the Morellis are poor, it is simply that so many things that we city-born Americans take for granted are not there for many other people in this world.

I start milking even before Isetta arrives. As a bucket is full, we transfer the milk inside a metal cylindrical container. When we have finished, Isetta and me, with several handcart trips, carry the heavy containers to the dairy hut, and leave them there. We go back to the cows immediately and give them water and hay from the loft.

Then we go to the farm kitchen, to get breakfast. It is not a lavish affair. Milk and ersatz coffee, really awful. Italians are being punished severely for their sins, as there is no coffee to be had almost anywhere in this country. Then we get pieces of leftover bread and soak it in the milk and coffee. That's it. In summer, because lunch is just a snack in the fields, the breakfast is richer, but now it is wintertime. After breakfast, Isetta and I go to the dairy hut, where Ersilia, the wife of the second son, reigns. She makes butter and cheese and we help her. Her two children, very well behaved, play in a corner while their mother works and sometimes Isetta plays with them for a while. I like cheese making so much that I say jokingly that when I'll go back to the States I'll move to Wisconsin and start a business there.

Isetta is curious, and so I tell her more about America, about the different characteristics of the different States, such as cheese making in Wisconsin and the wineries in California. As I speak she looks enchanted. I am also enchanted. She is more than pretty, she is subtly beautiful, with dark tresses, a heart shaped face and the deep brown eyes of a doe. She is funny, and she is also puzzling. I sense a mystery about her, and would like to know her better.

Everybody gathers in the kitchen for lunch, now that is winter and there is not a lot of outside work to do. Lidia, Morelli's wife, called l'_Azdora _- a housewife of rank, in the Emilia's dialect - owns the kitchen and takes care of all cooking. Mostly we get polenta, a sort of hardened corn porridge, seasoned with butter and cheese, or sometimes pasta. Meat we get very rarely and when we do, it is chicken, or salami, or ham. In the afternoon we rest for a while and I read. I have re-read many times the modern poetry anthology I had with me, so now I am delving in past issues of one of Italy's more popular magazines, "_La Domenica del Corriere_," that Morelli collects and treasures. It is a good exercise to perfect my Italian. I know I have an accent, but there is nothing I can do about it.

Later on, there is the stable routine to be repeated. Supper is lighter than lunch. We get a soup with beans, or lentils, or turnips, or cabbage and potatoes. Everything is delicious, as Lidia is a magical cook. Then there is cheese, sometimes an omelet and more vegetables. For dessert we get maybe one of the apples wintering in the house loft under the roof, or boiled chestnuts. And we drink the sparkling red wine, Lambrusco, with every meal.

After dinner we sit companionably in the kitchen, warmed by the stove. The women knit and Morelli makes baskets. I cannot follow the conversation, because the dialect they speak is so far from normal Italian that I don't understand a word. When the children have been sent to bed, around 10pm, a radio is taken out from under a concealing pile of wood, plugged in and finally we all listen raptly to _Radio Londra_. After the news, a certain Colonel Stevens reads "the messages". They also are in Italian, directed to the Resistance and are in a code of sort, but they sound very funny. "The water is hot". "Peppe has gone to the market." "Giovanni has a cold." And so on. I muse on the fact that my arrival from the sky was surely not announced by _Radio Londra_, but by some _staffetta_, seen that my mission was kept a secret not only from the enemy, but from our allies too.

In the evenings I sit near Isetta, who sometimes translates for me when she thinks that something funny, or important, has been said. I look at her nimble hands working. She is making a crochet shawl, perfectly round. Once done, it will be folded in two and the warm half moon will go to cover shoulders and upper arms. All the women I have seen, here and in Salerno, seem to wear one. Isetta is using bottle-green wool, and the round patterns she creates while working are very complicated and pretty.

I am puzzled by her. She speaks Italian with almost no trace of the local accent. Once, when I saw that she was going to stumble on a discarded stool, I said "careful" instead of "_attenzione"_, and she checked herself. I suspect she understands English, which is strange. In high school here they teach French, and now also German, not English, and my language is studied privately only by very upper class children. At least I was told so. It starts normally with having a British nanny. A few days ago she was telling me a funny story of her childhood, involving a cat and a horse, and she said that it happened one day when she was going with her mother to met her father at the University. She reddened and then hastily added that her father is a janitor there. I am not sure she is telling the truth. Certainly it is unlikely that a janitor's daughter had private language lessons, or a British nanny.

She is also a reader, in a house where there are no books. I know, because we like discussing books, throwing titles over the cows. She mostly has read Italian authors, of whom I don't know much, but she has also read, translated she said, a lot of English literature, and we compare notes. All in all, she seems very different from the other women in the Morelli's family, even conceding that she is living in a city and she is frequenting the _Liceo scientifico_, the science oriented high school, that is. I am more and more intrigued. And then, one day she lets it slip that, even before coming here, she had stopped going to school, which I don't understand.

Days pass and I realize that am getting slightly obsessed by her. I am desperate to uncover the mystery she represents, but there is more. Her soft red lips call to me, and I wonder what it would feel like to kiss them. The body I can hardly discern, covered in layers of heavy cloth, becomes also an object of curiosity and wonder. Despite her thick woolen stockings and her no-nonsense boots, I think her legs are shapely and desirable, and so I desire them.

One morning, when I have finished with my last cow and am waiting for her to finish hers, I look at her delicate but capable hands working the elongated teat and I am smitten by a thought so obscene that it makes me cringe. Cringe everywhere, but not there. There I am getting a shameful hard on. I pretend to have something to do with one of the windows' shutters, so that she can only see my back, until the embarrassment subsides. The day passes normally, but at night I dream of her, and she is not milking a cow. I wake up painfully aroused and I rush immediately to the pump dousing myself with the ice cold water until I return normal, so that she will not find me in this state.

Now, this is not really like me. I am male, and I might have my moments. But never like this. Thinking dirty about an extremely nice girl who is barely eighteen, innocent, and has done nothing to give me ideas. What the hell is happening to me?

Chapter endnotes:

Edward is falling in love. As it is sometimes the case, his lower parts are the first to acknowledge it. Higher and nobler feelings will surely follow.

Believe it or not, the breakfast I describe was the one I got myself as a little girl, years after the war, and mine was quite a well-to-do family. Now things have changed and Italians even eat corn flakes.

The children of country people did not go to high school at the time; with few exceptions their studies stopped with elementary school.

So, what is the secret of Isetta?


	6. Chapter 6 Music

**The Parachutist, by Camilla10**

A/N Maybe some of you think that the story is unfolding too slowly … when the hell is he becoming a vamp? He will, poor boy. (And I am rather proud of the horrific chapters that will deal with that). But first he has to discover human love. This Edward will not be a virgin vampire …

Now, since today is St Valentine I have a present for you. I always thought that the passionate italian song Meravigliosa creatura, sang by Gianna Nannini, expresses completely the passion of Bella for Edward. I discovered that my idea was not that original and a twiligt insipred video was done. I translated the lyrics. If you want it, I need your (If not accessible from your profile). just let me know.

Chapter 6 Music

It is time to slaughter the pigs. But, this is considered a typically male task and _Papà _Morelli can't do it alone (or with my unenthusiastic help. I really don't like the idea). In any case, killing them is only the first step; so many other operations must follow, that simply there is not the manpower for them. We could manage one, not ten. At the same time it is better to kill them now, before they are requisitioned, as it might well happen, and has actually happened in other farms. So this time the pigs will be sold. Payment will be in nature, with hams, sausages, salami and all the wonderful things a pig can offer. Part of the goodies will be retained by the slaughterhouse owner, therefore it is not as profitable as doing everything in the farm, but this time is the only solution, and Morelli goes for it.

A truck comes and all but me, that can't be seen, help to push the unfortunate animals inside. Morelli eventually comes back from the slaughterhouse with big enamel pails full of body parts that are not going to be processed, but are meant to be eaten fresh. As a first step the _Azdora_ proceeds to make _ciccioli,_ and I am told that this is a mouthwatering delicacy. It is the pig fat nearer the skin, cut in small pieces and stir fried until crisp. There are a lot of them, because _ciccioli_ do not spoil once cooked, and can be eaten for months. A big part of it will go in the mountains for the boys. But the first pieces, still hot, we eat ravenously. And they are indeed delicious. The Lambrusco flows freely and everybody is in high spirits until I notice that Isetta is not eating the _ciccioli,_ she is eating bread and cheese.

When I ask why, she tells me that she is not feeling too well and eating fried animal fat would not help her tummy. But, in fact, she does not look sick at all. She is even more beautiful, if possible. And the way she looks at me melts my heart.

In the last days I have been able to eradicate my libidinous thoughts, and there have been no further embarrassing episodes. But by doing this, by telling myself that she is an enchanting girl, deserving to be cherished and loved, not ravished, I have changed my attitude. Yes, Isetta deserves to be loved, and I am falling in love with her. I cannot deny it anymore.

Just what I need. No, wait, I do need it. But here, now… the circumstances I find myself in are really impossible. How can I court her? And if, please God, she reciprocates, how do we progress from here? I'll have to leave soon, and then, if I survive the trip, we will be on the opposite sides of the Gothic Line until the war ends. No, I should do nothing.

If I can, that is.

I don't think I can.

Christmas time comes and goes, a wartime festivity without particular celebrations, apart the enormous pile of tortellini the women prepare and then serve, swimming in clear chicken broth. I have my generous portion brought to me in the barn loft, because there are relatives visiting, and the more people know that I am here the more risky is the situation.

There is no further news of the mythical truck that should take me South. Apparently one made the trip, but its drivers absolutely refused to run the risk of taking me along. I am not as insistent as my duty should be. I am in love and I want to stay near Isetta. Every day I discover something new and endearing about her, and every day I am more curious, because I feel that something about her doesn't add up.

On January 22nd _Radio Londra_ gives us the welcome news that Operation Shingle is underway. The Anglo American forces have landed in Anzio, on the sea, just south of Rome. We wait anxiously to hear that Rome has been liberated, but days pass and our army seems to be stalled. The German counteroffensive is deadly, but it will be broken soon, hopefully. Because we think that the allies will advance, it would not make a lot of sense that I leave now, putting my drivers at risk. Morelli decides that I have to wait and see what happens.

So I go on tending the cows, learning to make cheese and trying to conquer Isetta's heart as she has conquered mine. Tiny signals tell me that I might be succeeding, but she is very shy and reserved, and I respect that.

Then, one morning there is a great commotion. People are coming. I retreat to the barn and from there I hear the information exchanged with the newcomers, voices raising, but, as usual, I cannot understand a word. Then, from a crack in the shutter, I see Morelli embracing his wife, something I have never seen, because country people do not show affection in public. It seems that she is crying. The Morellis follow the newcomers and all go away.

When Isetta finally comes to the barn, the mystery is unveiled. Uncle Ugo, the brother of Lidia's mother, is dead. In his bed, probably due to a stroke. He was a sort of hermit, she tells me, but a very nice man, beloved by the family. He never married, and the one passion of his life was the opera. When he had the money he went to Bologna, Parma, Reggio to enjoy it. One momentous time he even went to La Scala, in Milan. He saved and saved, until he was able to buy himself a very good gramophone and a collection of records, and he was ready to share his pleasure with whomever wanted to listen. Since here in Emilia, where Giuseppe Verdi was born, lyrical music is loved by many, he often had visitors, the only case when he was happy not to be alone, provided they shut up.

The same evening we are gathered in the kitchen after supper, but there is no conversation going on. Ersilia proposes that they all recite a rosary for the deceased. This is a first, because the family has never indicated to be particularly religious, so far. Only Ersilia and Santina go to mass, and not every Sunday, at that. But death brings in thoughts of the afterlife and religion comes into the equation. So I assist to this very Roman Catholic prayer, recited in approximate Latin, repetitive and mesmerizing. Soothing, I must admit. Papà Morelli does not pray, though. Fine, it is a long time now that I have suspected that he is a Communist. Not that I mind at all. Isetta also is not praying. Probably her father shares the beliefs of his brother, so her family is not religious.

We hear a bicycle sliding on the courtyard's gravel. Morelli looks from the window, opening the shutter a notch and stops me, ready to do my vanishing act from the pantry window. "No, you can stay," he tells me, "Don Luigi knows all about you being here. He is helping my boys a lot." Amazing Italians, the communist and the priest together in the Resistance.

The priest, however, came for reasons connected with his ministry. The funeral of uncle Ugo will be celebrated the day after tomorrow, a Saturday, so more people can attend but, there is a big problem. Nuccio, the church's organist, is seriously ill, suspected pneumonia, and cannot play.

Lidia is devastated. Her uncle loved music so much and to send him to his eternal rest without a High Mass with music seems to her seriously disrespectful. Maybe due to the priest's presence, this time the discussion is in Italian, not in dialect, and I can follow it. Lidia is a strong woman, but she is on the verge of tears and her husband doesn't know what to do. I am moved. She has her three sons with the partisans, risking their life every day, she is aiding and abetting an enemy soldier, but what throws her is not to have music at her uncle's funeral.

"Don Luigi," I say, "I play the piano and I have also played the organ, sometimes. If you would allow it, I could try…"

Everybody looks at me as if I have grown two heads. This part of my biography I have not shared with anybody.

_Papà_ Morelli is totally against the idea.

"Too dangerous. You could be seen." But Don Luigi beams at me.

"Thank you, my son. You are brave, and have a good heart. Maybe we can make it work. "

So a plan is developed. I will go into the church tomorrow night, and stay inside. With Don Luigi we will look into the music sheets and find pieces I am already familiar with, if possible. I cannot really practice, or maybe just for an hour before the funeral starts. After the Mass, he will tell anybody who asks that he hosted a visiting priest, who offered to play, but then had to leave immediately after the funeral. On the contrary, I will remain inside the church until dark and slip out when everybody will be at supper. I'll bring food and water with me and will stay completely unmoving until the church is empty and closed.

Finally, it is decided. Eventually everybody congratulates me, Lidia hugs me, Morelli clasps my hand. When I get outside to go to my loft, I find Isetta waiting for me. She puts her hands on my shoulders, kisses my cheek and runs inside. I go to bed with a silly smile on my face.

The following evening I slip unseen into the church, dedicated to Saint Mary of Peace. Ah, a wishful name! Don Luigi guides me trough the little door and narrow staircase leading to the organ. He explains to me the various passages of a Catholic Mass and the moments when I will be expected to play. Eventually we agree on requiem music by Albinoni, Mozart and Faure, adapted for organ solo. I know their work, but I will read the music sheets this night, just in case. It is very cold in the church, so Don Mario has carried here some blankets and a small brazier, recommending that I am very careful, we don't want a fire.

He shows me a bucket in a dark corner. I am grateful, as I will need to relieve myself, sooner or later. All in all I realize that I am truly happy with this escapade. I read the scores but, very soon I roll in my blankets and sleep like a log. I wake up quite early as usual, the cows now regulate my life, even if I don't have to take care of them today. Around 7 Don Mario pops up with a mug of a hot, red brew. _Karkadè_, he explains, the autarchic answer to coffee and tea. It comes from the Italian colonies in Africa and it is made with hibiscus flowers. I find it very good, better, certainly than the awful ersatz coffee I normally get. When the priest goes away, he closes the access door and takes the key with him, so that nobody can wander up here.

Time for some practice. The moment my fingers touch the organ keys, I feel home. I can barely remember the reasons why I left Curtis after my parents' death. I am not unhappy to be fighting in this war, but now I am sure that I will return to my piano and to concerts, and I will complete my studies.

Before 10 the church fills with people. There are enough peepholes to afford me a good view. The coffin is carried inside by six men, Papà Morelli among them. I execute the first piece and the Mass starts.

After a final blessing of the coffin, the Mass ends. But I feel the strong desire to thank uncle Ugo for giving music back to me. He was an opera lover, Verdi among his idols. Do I dare? Yes. I don't have the score, but what I want to play I remember perfectly. Humming the words under my breath, I start playing the music of the Nabucco's chorus. The haunting, beautiful, longing song of the exiled Jews…

_Va', pensiero, sull'ali dorate._

_Va', ti posa sui clivi, sui colli,_

………………..

Fly, thoughts, on wings of gold;

go settle upon the slopes and the hills,

where, soft and mild,

the sweet air of our native land smells fragrant!

Greet the banks of the Jordan

and Zion's toppled towers.

Oh, my country so lovely and lost!

Oh, memory so dear and despairing!

………..

When I finish, the church is totally silent.

Chapter endnotes

In the next chapter Isetta's secret will be unveiled.

Please review

If you don't know the magnificent Nabucco chorus, just google Va pensiero by Verdi and you will find many good executions on You Tube.

A lot of people, my family included, did not drink _karkadè,_ mostly for political reasons, as it came from the colonies and they were anti colonialists. Plus, the fascist government promoted it. It seems to me like cutting your 'nose' to spite your wife. Don Luigi was more pragmatic. And it is actually a very good brew…with a lemony under taste, to be savored both hot and cooled in summer.


	7. Chapter 7 Her secret

**The Parachutist, by Camilla10**

Chapter 7- Her secret

In silence they file out of the church, to wait outside for the pallbearers. When the coffin is in the churchyard, a loud applause erupts. Inside the church Don Luigi makes a show of closing the door to the organ, already closed. He tells some people lingering nearby that the replacement organist, a visiting priest who offered to play, out of Christian charity, has already gone before he could thank him properly. "He really was in a hurry. But he was good, wasn't he?" He asks, and everybody agrees. I barely breathe, but I feel quite smug.

Now I have to wait. When finally the church is empty and closed and everybody has gone either home or to the cemetery, I can move. I eat some cheese and an apple, drink water and make use of the bucket.

Then there is not much to do until evening. I have nothing to read, but the music sheets, and they help me to pass the time. I did not know that Puccini also wrote a requiem. My fingers itch to play, but I know that I can't. And they are freezing, anyway. The brazier's coals have extinguished themselves long since.

After 5 pm it is night, and the weather has turned foul. A cold wind is blowing and soon it will be raining. Don Luigi frees me and tells me to go back to the Morellis. There is nobody around. I run the mile and a half to the farm, glad to be stretching my legs. Back home I used to run as an exercise, to keep me fit for my parachute drops. I have almost arrived when Isetta pops out of a small poplar woods. And she embraces me, tight. I am startled, but in a moment I too have my arms around her. She speaks in a rush, tendrils of vapor coming from her mouth in the cold air. "Edoardo, you play like.. I have no words… it was so beautiful… and the "_Va pensiero_", Lidia was so happy, it was a favorite of her uncle….It was special for me too, because…"

She checks herself and stops speaking. She kisses me instead. Her lips, warm and soft, taste very sweet. I am almost dizzy, but I don't let her go. I want more kisses, Her mouth is slightly open now..can I? Our tongues brush, dance …. Dammit, big cold raindrops fall on our faces. Isetta laughs, puts her shawl on her head and we make a run for the farm. I let her go inside and wait under a shed. Hopefully nobody knows that she came out to meet me, and it is better so.

When I too get into the warm kitchen I am greeted, feted and served a delicious meal. Instead of the usual soup Lidia made ravioli, with a filling of fresh cheese, parmesan and herbs. I wolf them down, stealing glances to Isetta, who keeps her eyes averted. Her cheeks are quite red, however. I hope nobody notices or they think that it is due to the cold.

All night I dream of her. I can't wait to speak to her again, and, if possible, to kiss her. I want to know why the Nabucco's Chorus is so special for her, but the cows have priority.

After breakfast we go back to work and have almost finished, when _Papà_ Morelli comes to the stable. "Please, Isetta, come with me, somebody needs to speak with you." She becomes very pale and follows him. I too peep outside and see Don Luigi waiting in front of the farm door.

They all get inside. I finish my chores, wash my hands and go to the dairy, but Ersilia is not here yet. When she comes, she has a grim expression on her face and doesn't say anything. As today her children are whiney, she speaks to them harshly. I don't dare to ask what happened. At lunch, Isetta in not there. In the afternoon I work alone in the barn and she is not with us at suppertime. I finally ask about her, and am curtly told that she is not feeling well.

I am losing my mind and pass a sleepless night. But, in the morning she comes.

On her pale face, her reddened eyes are heart wrenching to see. I am not going to ignore her sorrow. I gather her in my arms. "_Tesoro_, what happened?" She gulps, tries to say something, but is stopped by a new flood of tears. Then she tells me. _Papà e mamma_ – her parents- are dead. "My God, was it a bomb?" I ask, appalled, but also surprised. Due to the weather, we have not heard allied planes on their route to Bologna in the last days.

"No, no," she says, rage overcoming her. "Two days ago the _Repubblichini _discovered where they were hiding and went for them," she almost screams, "but my father resisted, tried to help my mother to run from a back window. Then there were shots….Everybody in the courtyard could see and hear what was happening. Neighbors have seen the gang carrying out two covered bodies. My father was well known, so eventually Don Luigi heard the news, and he knows who I am, so he came to tell me…"

I look at her speechless. "You want to know why?" She continues, "Simple, they were Jews, that's why. They are rounding up the Jews of Bologna now, sending them to concentration camps in Austria and Poland. I am one of them, Edoardo, by law I should wear the yellow star."

All I was puzzled by is crystal clear now. This is Isetta's secret, a terrible one, indeed. Every day, every hour, every second she is in mortal danger.

The damn cows are needy, as usual. I sit her down on her stool. "Please, love, don't move, don't do anything. Let me hurry with this." I don't do a great job, but I take enough milk so that they will not start mooing.

Then, again in my arms, she tells me the full story. Her father, Paolo Finzi, was a professor of Biology at the University, obliged to resign when the racial laws were adopted. As the Finzi were very well off, this had no financial consequences for them. Her mother, fearing the future, wanted to leave and go abroad, to Switzerland or even to the US, like other Jews were doing but, her father was connected with the liberal circles opposing the regime, so he refused, as his clandestine political activity was extremely important for him. Later on, the situation worsened and leaving became more complicated. At a certain point Isabella, this is her real name, also had to leave school. However, the regime did not actively send people to concentration camps like in Germany. If anything, Professor Finzi was more at risk for his political activities than for being a Jew.

But, in September1943, when the King of Italy signed a ceasefire with the Allies and fled South, everything changed. The Social Republic kowtowed to the Nazis, and Jews extermination had already been in its programs, if not enforced. Now it would. When it was feared that actual deportations were about to begin, her parents tried to ensure Isabella's safety. They had known the Morelli family for years, because one of the activities of uncle Ugo was that of a _corriere_, people from the country, that is, who brought fresh farm products, like cheese, butter and eggs, to city dwellers with means.

In summer, going to seek some respite from oven hot Bologna in the coolness of the Appennini mountains, the Finzi had frequently stopped to visit the farm. A friendship of sort had ensued, cemented by their shared anti fascist feelings. Brave as usual, the Morellis had accepted to host Isabella, passing her off as a niece. She had no contact with her parents for a while, but she knew they were continuously on the move, after deportations actually started in November. They were sleeping in different houses, helped by trusted friends. But, in the end, they were discovered.

I don't think I can find words to console her. They probably are not going to be found. So I give her myself instead, I tell her who I am. I tell her of my parent's death and of my sense of guilt, that for a while had made me forsake music. But, after uncle Ugo's funeral, this is true no more, I add. I know that I am born to play the piano, and that is what I will do all my life, if I can.

I tell her about being a parachutist, and the beauty of flying in the silence of the sky. I also tell her that I had disliked intensely what I had to do during Operation Avalanche, and for this reason I had volunteered for this mission. I will avoid spilling blood, if I can. And then I tell her how much I love her, I say that I grieve for her and she is not standing alone, but I'll do my best to… here is when my Italian falters and I continue in English, telling her that she is my angel and I…

"No, you are my angel," she interrupts, "you fell from the sky…"

Isetta, no, Isabella, does speak English after all, with an endearing British accent. Then she adds that we are both orphans now, and that is a bond, because I can understand her and she can understand me…. We exchange soft, sweet kisses and she bravely offers me a small smile.

We take the milk to the dairy and go to have breakfast. I cannot wait for the morning to pass, I need to speak with her again, I need to take her in my arms and never let go. The minutes drag on and on, at a snail pace….

Chapter endnotes

Did you guess Isabella's secret, or it is a surprise for you? I have scattered clues here and there. In either case, I so would like to get a review.

Under German occupation in Europe the Jews were obliged to stitch a yellow six pointed star on their dresses, to make them easy to identify. In Denmark, however, that brave King went out strolling with the yellow star on his coat, and his example was followed by other non Jews, so there the rule was not enforced.


	8. Chapter 8 Lovers

**The Parachutist, by Camilla10**

Chapter 8- Lovers

After lunch I lay on my narrow bed, processing what Isabella has told me. I contemplate her loss and the fact that she must keep it hidden, if not from the Morelli family members, at least from any visitor coming. Her fake father the janitor is supposed to be alive and well in Bologna, after all. I was allowed to mourn openly for my parents, when they died but, this has been denied her. I fully realize now what it means to be a Jew in Europe. You are already declared dead, and you just have to wait for the axe to fall. The horror that Nazism is has not been fully understood in the US; reports about people being herded to concentration camps and killed there were disbelieved by many. Germany was admired and respected. What a joke!

Without Pearl Harbor would my country still be neutral? Good question. I tremble for the constant danger Bella is in, and my incapacity to protect her, as I too am in danger. If only I could safely bring her South with me!

My tortured thoughts come to an abrupt halt when the barn door opens and somebody is climbing the ladder. There is a soft knock on the planks. "_Avanti_, come in," I say and she rushes into my arms. There are no words. We kiss and kiss again and our passion grows. After a while, kisses do not seem to be enough. My half-hearted attempt to stop comes to nothing, when she whispers into my ear

"Love me, Edward." _Amami, amami_… Oh yes….

* * *

She has left now, because we can't afford to be discovered. _Papà _Morelli protects her as if she was his daughter and he would not easily forgive what we have just done.

Now I am alone, paralyzed by shame and sorrow. I have behaved like a fucking animal. Exactly so.

Took my pleasure, hurt her and finished so fast that she had not a chance to enjoy what we were doing. And she already scarred by what happened to her parents. Oh, I comforted her well and truly indeed.

Idiot. Romanticizing sex. Only with the woman I love, I had said to myself. No easy girls, no whores, so help me God. If I was really desperate, I took care of my needs, but not frequently. And so there I was two hours ago, virgin at 23, totally clueless. Had I gone with my comrades in arms to the _casino_, I would at least have had an idea of what to expect. What is worst is that I was so far gone, and it went so quickly, that I did not manage to withdraw… what if she gets pregnant?

Of course I would marry her. I love her so much. But would she want it? She is probably so disgusted by it all that she wouldn't want any man anymore, me less than anybody else. And it is all academic anyway, in the middle of a war, no papers to our name, how can we marry?

Before leaving the barn there is a thing I must do. I wash the sheet bearing the proof of her lost virginity, a gift which I did not deserve, and leave it to dry in the barn's loft, invisible from below.

-----****-------

She is crossing the courtyard, carrying something to the dung heap. When she sees me she blushes, and then she smiles. "_Ciao Edoardo_," she says. How come she is not angry, how come she does not hate me?

Is it possible that she did not expect any better? This is even worse.

"Bella, _mi dispiace tanto,_ I am so very sorry.." I say.

"Sorry for what?" She asks. I am searching for words, it is so difficult, but I must try and explain myself. She misunderstands my meaning and says

"No,_ Edoardo_, you must not be sorry. I came to you, I wanted it."

"Yes, me too, I rush on "But I was selfish and rough and I fear I have not pleased you at all." She looks at me, puzzled, and then her face becomes fiery red.

"I have nothing to compare with," she murmurs.

Well, neither do I, but I am sure it should have been different. But she is so innocent, so loving, so forgiving, that I feel a glimmer of hope. The way I see it now, we are meant to be together for life. So maybe we have time to learn. I have time to learn how to make her truly happy, to adore her as she deserves.

I remember when my father had "the talk" with me. I think it was very different from the usual talk of a dutiful father to his adolescent son. It was not about the mechanics of sex, or marginally so. He spoke of love between a man and a woman. He spoke of his experience with my mother. He chose his words carefully, not to embarrass me and out of respect for her, but it was enough to make me understand how things could be, how two lovers could bring each other to heaven. With this model in mind, it was easy for me to decide I would wait until I too found love. But when I did, I had not accounted for my traitorous body. Hence the debacle. Never again like that, I promise myself.

------****------

We work together in the barn, but we don't speak. We are so attuned to each other that I know what her next move will be, as she seems to know mine. After supper we sit together in the kitchen, she apparently following the conversation and I re-running our hour together, my clumsiness, my selfishness, my stupidity… and my pleasure, dammit.

When everybody is going to bed and she thinks nobody is looking, she takes my hand and whispers, _"Ti amo, Edoardo._" She loves me. The moment after, she is gone upstairs.

The cows' needs are unrelenting. Milk, feed, clean up the soiled straw, take it to the dung heap, take the milk to the dairy… If we don't come together again I think I will die. I want her, I want to redeem myself, I want, I want…

* * *

Worshipping her, keeping myself in check. This is about her. She has managed to come again to visit me. This time we have undressed completely and I have been almost overwhelmed by her perfection. Much as I want to bury myself inside her and let go, I know I must wait. My member is throbbing, aching, but I resist. And the pain of denial after a while becomes exquisite. Discovering the things that please her. Her breasts, supple and smooth, made for my hands. The rosy peaks hardening under my lips. She moans and raises her hips toward me, so that I am almost undone. No, not yet. I explore some more. She is perfect everywhere, even there. Do I dare to bring my hand down there? I try a ghost touch and she trembles, but not in fear or disgust. Oh God, she likes it. She is wet for me. My fingers are on a mission now, they caress, they touch, they press, they stroke… her core is my piano and the music is divine. She moans and moves toward my hand. Two fingers are inside now and I work them to her rhythm. My thumb is pressing where she … Bella stifles a scream and her tight walls contract. My hand is drenched. That's it, I made her come. I feel incredibly proud of myself. But she wants more. When she pushes against me, she feels my hard arousal against her hip. Her hand slips between us and she touches me. It is a light caress, but it sets me on fire. I am done waiting, I'll take her now.

--------***--------

Very soon she will have to leave, so that she is not missed when the afternoon and evening activities start, but for the moment she is resting in my arms, and she is smiling. I am smiling too. My effort at restraint bore fruit. I did not end quickly this time and I pleasured her, again. Not to speak of myself. And I was able to withdraw in time.

There is something I must tell her before she goes.

"_Tesoro,_ my darling," I say, kissing her lightly, "the first time I was careless. There could be…consequences. But even if there aren't…" God, this is difficult, but I continue.

"My love, I know I have no right to say it, because for the moment it is impossible…but, when this madness ends, I want to marry you. It will end, we are winning the war. The stall in Anzio will end, we will take Rome and then we will march North." She is not answering, her beautiful brown eyes boring into mine.

"Is religion important for you?" I ask, "I'll do whatever it takes. I will convert, if you want it."

And finally she speaks.

"No, not really. my family is, was, not religious. Once, when I discussed it with my dad, he said that when I found love and was sure of it, it would not matter if he was not a Jew…"

She suddenly stops speaking. Her eyes fill with tears. She is remembering her father and her loss. I rise from the bed taking her with me.

"Isabella Finzi," I say formally, even if we are both naked, "will you marry me and come to America with me?"

"Yes" she answers.

I am the happiest man alive.

Chapter endnote

Oh my poor Edward, little you know what is going to happen to you at the end of the next chapter. You, dear reader, obviously must know, since you read the summary. And it is not going to be nice and fluffy, I promise you.

Reviews?


	9. Chapter 9 Travelling South

**The Parachutist, by Camilla10**

Chapter 9 Travelling South

Early March 1944

I am lying in the double bottom of the truck, sacks of beans, lentils, chickpeas and other dry goods placed over its top. I am not too uncomfortable, as I can stretch completely and I have an old piece of carpeting under me. I can also breathe, there are plenty of holes. For sure I can feel every bump of the road, but that is to be expected. Near my right hand I have a bottle of water, near the other I have another bottle, empty, that I will use when I need to pee.

So I am finally going back to the American Army. Hopefully. The Allies forces are still on the Anzio shores, trapped by the Germans. Papà Morelli decided it was time for me to go. Not only because of the military stall, but also because he discovered what was going on between me and Isetta, as he continued to call her to avoid slips, even if he was aware now that I knew her real name, Isabella, or Bella, as she likes to be called. Without entering in any detail, he made me understand that her visits to me had not gone undetected, and that I had sorely abused his hospitality. To this I had answered sincerely that we were very much in love, that I planned to marry her as soon as it became possible, and that she had accepted my proposal. This softened him a little. I also found a way to tell him that we had been… careful. In fact, after that wretched first time, we have been, and one day she told me that she was not pregnant.

So I had to leave her. We knew it would happen, and now it has.

As the truck travels, I relive all that has passed since we became lovers, and all the discoveries we made since then. All in all it was a short, blissful month. _Febraro corto e amaro,_ they say in Italy, meaning that February is a short and bitter month. Ours was incredibly sweet, if short.

As _coitus interruptus_ is not such a safe way to avoid pregnancies, I eventually remembered that I had a package of condoms with me, in my survival kit, along with chocolate, dry meat, chewing gum, and some first aid medication. The condoms had been distributed to us in Salerno, after a stern lecture on venereal diseases, and everybody had put them either in their pockets or in the survival kit. I did not want them, but I also did not want to stand out, so I did the latter and promptly forgot about them. Now they would come handy, if only I knew how to use them and she was not put off by them. What happened was that we learned together, she actually helped me to put one on. We laughed a lot and thoroughly enjoyed the follow up. Finally I was able to really understand what my father had meant when he had given me the famous sex talk.

Nothing is shameful, nothing is forbidden between lovers, because, through love, everything that pleases a couple becomes right, perfect and pure. One of our last days together, when it had became impossible for her to visit me after lunch, as she intentionally was given tasks to perform at that hour, she came to the barn without her panties. There was little time, so I made her recline on her stool and, just unbuttoning my trousers, I took her from behind, almost roughly, while she muffled her sounds of pleasure in her shawl. As the few remaining condoms were up in the loft, I spilled my seed on the straw littered floor. Was it demeaning? No, it was glorious.

The truck stops somewhere in the woods and I can get out. We are not meant to stop at night, the two drivers, Marco and Bepi, take turns at the wheel, but this stop is for me. I empty my pee bottle and they give me food. I ask where we are, and they say that they think we are entering Tuscany now, but we are choosing secondary roads and roundabouts, lest we are challenged and stopped. They have papers, but they prefer not to be challenged, obviously.

The trip resumes, it is day again and it is sunny, after a lot of rain.

Other random memories come to me. Me asking finally for the hot bath in the zinc tub, and actually getting it, twice. My body is no longer mine only, is also hers, and I want it to be pleasant, I want it to have a nice smell. Then, getting a cup of hot water, taking it with me and shaving properly every day, lest my stubble irritates her delicate skin. My hair has grown a lot from the original crew cut and Bella seems to like it.

"Dark red," I say. "No," she corrects me, "_Bronzo_", running her fingers through it until I almost purr… She tells me that I am handsome, but she uses the Italian word "_bello_".

"No, you are beautiful," I protest.

To leave her has been awful.

"I will be back," I promised, "only death could prevent me doing it." And we both cried, because those were not idle words. I could well die, and so could she, a Jewish girl persecuted by Nazis.

The truck splutters, trembles and grounds to a halt. I hear the men swearing. They attempt a number of different things, but there is nothing they can do. It is dead.

They let me out. It is clear that they are extremely nervous and don't know exactly what to do. Hell, I am nervous too. Finally, they tell me that they think there is a mechanic in the small town a couple miles from here. They know the place. But they don't want me anywhere around while the truck is being repaired. If it is possible, that is, because if a replacement piece is needed, it might not be available.

In the meanwhile I am to go to a certain tavern just out of town, da Moranda is the name. The tavern, Marco and Bepi tell me, is full of _borsari neri_, namely people trading foods and other things in violation of rationing rules. Even the tavern owner is involved in black market activities; therefore, even if I am suspected of being an_ Americano_, nobody would be calling the authorities on me, as they are understandably shy of police attention. I should go there after dark, take a quiet table, get a bed, speak very little and meet them the following afternoon near the ruins of a collapsed church at the town feet.

The plan is full of holes, anything can happen, and I wonder if they will really come to meet me the following afternoon, or just cut their losses and vanish.

In any case, I collect my backpack from the truck double bottom and leave them, going uphill toward the town. In the backpack, not a military one, I have my uniform, my gun, my knife, my emergency rations and my survival kit. Dangerous, but If I have the time to wear the uniform before I am captured, as it might well happen now, it could save my life. I left my carbine with Morelli, with its ammo. He would give everything to the boys. I have three things on my body: two are my dog tags, and the third, concealed in my unused cigarette case, is the cyanide ampoule. The exit pill. If I have reason to fear interrogation and torture, I just have to crack it with my teeth and goodbye. I don't want to die but, I cannot tell where I have been these past months. I cannot allow for Germans or _Repubblichini_ to go near the farm where Bella is. So yes, I keep my cyanide.

Marco and Bepi have recommended that I wait until dark to go to the tavern. A church offers me the possibility to wait less conspicuously. I get in. After a while I notice that I am not alone, there are three men sitting on a bench on the other side of the church. I look at them and they turn to look at me. They are young and good looking but, are wearing sunglasses. Weird, the church is dark enough.

Suddenly I experience one of my episodes. It is the first time in months, after the one I had with the scarred doctor in Salerno. I get a glimpse of a thought. One of the three men is hating the sun outside. He wants the sunset to hurry. I blink my eyes and I notice that the third man, dark haired and olive skinned, is looking at me with a surprised expression. Then they turn and speak among themselves with voices so low that I cannot hear anything. It is quite a discussion, though. When the sun is gone, the olive skinned man is the first to leave the church. After a while, the other two follow.

I wait some more, then I finally decide that it is time to go and sample the tavern's hospitality. I walk at a slow pace, I am not in a particular hurry.

Appearing from nowhere a man jumps in front of me. I am obliged to stop. He is one of the guys I saw in the church. He grabs me and throws me on the ground. Winded, I lose it for a minute. When I regain my senses, I am lying on my stomach behind some bushes and he is astride my upper thighs, pinning me down. I cannot move, such is his strength. With one hand he is keeping both my wrists on my back, in a viselike grip. His other hand is ripping the scarf off my neck. A turmoil of thoughts crosses my mind in seconds. Is he going to assault me sexually? I can't believe this is happening. I know that I am good looking, and I have been courted by men, both at Curtis and in the army. I had no girlfriends, I did not go whoring, so the mistake was possible. But I just declined the offer and that was that. Now I fear I am going to be raped and I am powerless to prevent it, because he is impossibly strong. He finally has managed to bare my skin and I smell his sweet scent as he twists my neck and exposes my throat, lowering his face to me. Heck, does he bathe in perfume? I feel his cold mouth, but he doesn't kiss me. He bites me.

Chapter endnotes

So, it has happened. The first part of The Parachutist ends here, with the end of Edward's humanity. The second part will be about his difficult transition into the undead state and how he will cope with it. Some dark chapters ahead, be prepared.

I'll update soon, but not just tomorrow. In the meanwhile I would so love to have your comments.


	10. Chapter 10 Change

**The Parachutist, by Camilla10**

A/N

**The Parachutist**** has been nominated for the ****Indie TwiFic Awards**** in the category: Canon or AU story that knocks you off your feet – work in progress! Voting starts this Saturday, March 20****th**** till March 3****rd****. If you like this story, please vote for it. Going on the Indie website you'll find more info, I google Indie Twific Awards. As I understand it, you can vote one story for each category. **

Chapter 10 - Change

I scream, but the pain subsides. The area where he sunk his sharp teeth feels sort of numbed. Then I realize that his cold lips are still on my neck and he is sucking and gulping. God, he is drinking my blood. I am dizzy.

So here is where I die, no firing squad, no cyanide pill, but this? I don't even have words for this. What is he? Another voice, furious:

"Damon, stop it, you are draining him. This was not the plan."

Suddenly my assailant is removed from me. I hear growls and the sounds of a struggle. Now I feel something cold and wet passing over the aching place where I was bitten. Someone throws me over his shoulder and starts running. It seems to me that we are flying. And then a new pain hits me. I am on fire, fire courses through my veins, I am burning alive, I am in hell. I scream and scream until a hard, cold hand covers my mouth. I pass out and when I awaken the burning is worse.

I am lying on an uneven stone floor. I hear a woman screaming. But I scream louder than her, until again, a cold hand covers my mouth. I writhe, I thrash, I desperately want to plunge into a lake, into a well, anything that could make the burning stop. My heart beats erratically, accelerating and slowing, I try to bite the hand on my mouth, but it is made of stone, I break a tooth. I cry, I whimper. My mouth is free now, because I have not the strength to scream anymore. I plead with him:

"Make it stop, make it stop, fuck you, make it stop." It doesn't stop. This is when I ask him to kill me.

He speaks to me, his melodious voice is calm, indifferent.

"It will pass," he says, "you just have to endure. For another couple of days, maybe three. You have lost a lot of blood, it should help."

It will pass, it will pass. I concentrate on those words repeating them to myself like a mantra. So this is not hell, it will pass.

Three days of this? I will go mad, it is an eternity; I cannot stand it. I start screaming again.

Another voice.

"Guido, when you were speaking to him he calmed somehow. Continue." So the one called Guido speaks to me, coming near my face.

"You are undergoing a change," he says. He too must have bathed in perfume. "When the burning ends and your heart stops beating you'll feel very well," he adds.

I cannot understand him, and the effort to grasp what he is saying dulls my pain a little. My heart will stop beating and I'll feel very well? Is he out of his mind? I have questions, but, if I open my mouth I'll start screaming again.

He tells me that, as soon as I am done, we will go to a town called Volterra. It is not very far, but we will travel at night, because we have to avoid sunlight, and I will be out of control. There my gift will be properly assessed. This is the reason why Damon has not killed me, he explains, because I have a gift.

I won't listen to him; he is not making any sense. Plus, the pain still ravages my body, waves of fire course up and down. Bless God, I pass out for a while, or maybe it is a long time. Then I awaken. How long, how long I have been laying here? I am still suffering, but I can't scream, my throat is raw, my voice is gone.

Time passes. I see the light from the window going away. Night comes, eternal, and then is morning again, and then night. If I stay completely still maybe it is more bearable. Or less unbearable.

My face must be burned out, hideous. I raise a hand to touch it and I feel that my skin is supple and cool, not blistered.

"He is changing fast," says somebody, Damon or Guido, I don't know.

Is this the second or third day? I don't know anything anymore. But… but, my hands and feet are not burning now. Slowly, slowly the fire is abating.

It takes time, but it happens. My arms and legs are becoming cold, and it feels so good.

Now the burning is only on the middle of my chest, concentrated, awful. My heart is drumming, booming, it resonates in my ears. Then it splutters, and, finally, is still. All is blank for a while, and then I awaken.

I am not dead, and I feel very well. He was right.

I open my eyes and I can't take it on. Everything is so bright, defined, new. So many colors, everything has colors I did not suspect existed. The wall in front of me is not simply brown… I don't even have the names for so many different shades of color.

"_He has awakened,"_ somebody says.

"Yes, I am awake," I answer, and the sound of my voice surprises me. It is soft and smooth, not raspy, despite the ache in my throat, surely due to all that screaming.

"_Great. Eleazar was right, he just read my mind."_

And I realize that nobody but me has spoken, so far. I can hear the rustle of leaves outside, somebody moving on the floor. And the smells. I am surrounded by smells, one of them very unpleasant, which my brain can hardly process.

I want to get up and I do. I move and I bump my head on the low ceiling. Did I jump? No pain, but the ceiling cracks.

Now I can finally focus on the two men standing in front of me, the ones from the church. The one who bit me. Damon. Instinctively I bend my knees into a crouching, defensive position. He does the same. I grab a chair to defend myself, and it splinters in my hands.

The other one, Guido I believe is his name is, advances, but slowly.

"Calm down. You have everything to learn. We need to explain things to you." But he also says, no, dammit, he thinks: _"Careful now, he is strong."_

Yes, I am hearing his thoughts. I recognize what is happening for what it is. Before, it was a random and rare experience, but now, now I'm getting everything. I just need to separate what I am hearing, because of course they are both thinking at the same time, and it confuses me.

Guido is looking at me intently. He is not wearing glasses anymore and his eyes are ruby red… _"What is your name?"_

"Edward, as if you don't already know it from my dog tags!" I snap.

"_It is true, he is a mind reader,"_ is his unspoken comment. _"What a catch. Aro will be delighted."_

"Stop this freak show and answer me properly," I say, getting angrier by the minute. "Who are you, where are we and what did you do to me?"

"We just did something very good for you," Damon sneers, "now you are strong, fast, and invulnerable. You should be grateful. Do yourself a favor, acknowledge it, so we can leave this godforsaken place and get to Volterra. Our boss will love to have you. He is collecting talents and you seems to have a very special one. When you join the Volturi guard you will advance very fast."

"_And me too,"_ he thinks, _"Aro can be generous. When Eleazar told us that the one we had gone to seek near Ascoli, after a positive report, was no good, not particularly gifted, I dreaded going back empty handed."_

"Who the hell is Aro, and why should I join his guard? Are you crazy? I am an American officer, I am under orders." I try to stay calm, and understand what he is saying, but he really doesn't make any sense.

"You are an** undead **American officer, so your orders are no longer applicable." He laughs at me and I am thinking of what I could do to cancel the smirk from his face, when I realize that I am terribly thirsty. In fact the burn in my throat is becoming insufferable.

"I am thirsty," I say, "I need to drink."

"Go, take the woman," says Guido to Damon. He opens a door leading to a side room and comes out carrying a middle aged peasant woman. She is gagged, her arms and wrists are bound but, she is struggling weakly, her eyes rolled back, unfocussed. He just flicks a finger to her temple and she collapses in his arms, unconscious. He comes to me and takes the woman by the hair, yanking her head backward, and then he places her exposed throat under my nose.

I don't know what he wants from me, I don't understand, but my body does. The moment I smell her I am lost. Before I realize what I am doing, I have sunk my teeth into her flesh. So easy… Blood rushes into my mouth, warm, salty-sweet, delicious, empowering. My body tingles all over, almost overwhelmed by pleasure. I pull, I suck and I gulp, I'll miss not a drop..mine, all mine…

And then there is no more blood. I let the empty body fall on the floor, while my frenzy abates.

Christ, what have I done?

Chapter endnotes

This is my version of a change happening with nobody sympathetic around to help. However, the Volturi guards have been trained well enough, and they know that to manage a newborn vampire is something his sire has to do. So that is what Damon and Guido will attempt in the next chapter. But Edward is VERY angry.

Reviews?

I don't know if, according to Canon, Eleazar, the vampire who can sense talents, was still with the Volturi in 1944. But this is an AU story, so he was with them.


	11. Chapter 11 Lesson for a monster

**The Parachutist, by Camilla10**

**A/N****. Voting time is on from today to March 2nd. As you know the Parachutist has been nominated for the ****Indie TwiFic Awards**** in the category: Canon or AU story that knocks you off your feet! Work in progress www(.)theindietwificawards(.)com You can vote more than a story in each category, so please vote for me too, if you want. **

**I voted for others and it is quite easy.**

Violence ahead. You are warned.

Chapter 11- Lesson for a monster

The enormity of my action keeps me silent for a while. Revulsion and satisfaction are completely entangled.

Finally, I speak.

"What did you do to me? What have I become?" I ask, but I already know the answer, I don't need to see it in their mind. There is a name for what I have done, for what I am.

Vampire, I am a vampire. I just gorged myself with the blood of the woman I killed and I enjoyed it thoroughly. Just remembering how it felt sends a wave of pleasure along my strange, new body.

I can see myself in Damon's mind as he watches me, like in a mirror. My skin is pale and translucent, my eyes are red as theirs are. My face is the same, and yet not the same. It has the perfection of sculpted marble. No freckles, no spots of any kind, and the small scar on my eyebrow is gone. It is an inhuman face.

"OK, Damon, now shut up. You are no good with explanations. I'll speak to him." Guido says with an exasperated tone.

"Please, Edward, sit down and don't break the chair while you do it. The first thing you have to learn is to control your newborn strength."

I do sit down, carefully. I need to know what I have become. While I listen, however, I pursue a second line of thought.

_I HATE THEM._ There is no way I'll go meekly to Volterra. If I can, I'll avenge myself for what they have done to me. They have stolen my life for some advancement in that weird paramilitary organization they belong to. But I keep quiet.

All that Guido tells me I take to be the truth. I don't see anything different in his mind.

So, here is my lesson: I died and resurrected as a vampire. If a vampire bites a human and does not drain him dry, the venom he injects with his bite will transform the human in another vampire. Yes, because all the fluids in our bodies are substituted by this venom. When we desire a kill, it will pool in our mouths, like we are salivating.

Since I will not eat or drink anything but blood from now on, and that will be entirely processed, I'll not have any bodily function. I will not piss and I will not shit.

But, apparently, I can still fuck. This I gather from the mind of Damon, who has problems keeping his mouth shut and would like to comment on everything. He thinks that in Volterra there will be a number of female vampires queuing to be serviced by me, as I will be a novelty. Or male vampires, if that is what I like, as I am so pretty. How disgusting, to copulate with another monster of any gender. Forget it.

I learn more, as Guido continues to speak dispassionately.

Another perk is that I will not sleep anymore. Oh, fantastic. Think of the things I can do with all the extra hours! I can go back to Curtis, finish my courses in record time, and then I can drink all my professors alive. Good prospect, I didn't like some of them anyway.

Plus, I can breathe, but I can do without air. For instance, I can stay underwater indefinitely. Breathing is necessary only to speak and to smell. My senses are heightened now, and I can hear, see, and perceive odors like never before.

I cannot feel it myself, but my body has become cold and hard as stone. It will not change, it will not get old. No knife nor bullet will have any effect on it. Unbreakable. Yeah, I know it, I remember Guido's hand on my mouth. I broke a tooth then, but now my teeth are restored and perfect. Lethal.

My brain too has changed, I am told, and I'll never forget a thing. Very well. So the woman I have just killed will haunt me forever. Forever…I am not sure I grasp the concept, but I'll not think about it for the moment. Then Guido tells me that the memories of my human life will fade, and that this is a good thing. No, this is not good at all. I'll set myself to remember, I want to remember everything, so that I will not forget why I want to avenge myself on them.

As he has paused, I think I can ask something.

"Can you tell me of a good reason why I should follow you to Volterra?"

"Yes," he answers. "Vampires can stay alone and keep a nomadic lifestyle. Or they can join a coven. And the Volturi's one is the best, biggest and more powerful coven existing. Quite civilized, by the way. But that is not all. You are a newborn vampire, and your bloodlust will be out of control for a long time. Alone, you will kill indiscriminately and you will not cover your tracks properly, thus giving the secret away.

"What secret?" I ask.

"That vampires exist, of course." He grins, showing his strong, white teeth.

Oh, right.

"If you expose the secret you will be hunted down and destroyed. By us. This is the rule."

"Aren't we supposed to be indestructible?" I am curious.

"No, there are ways to terminate vampires." And he shows me. In his mind I watch the memory of an execution. Four vampires surround the condemned one. One of the four executioners, a small teenager boy, fixes the unmoving victim intensely. The others tear him limb by limb, then douse the remains with some fluid and set fire to them. Very soon only ashes remain.

"So, you see, you have not many choices," he concludes.

"_You just wait,"_ I think.

"Well, enough theory," Guido adds, "There are things better demonstrated than said, come with me."

We go outside the tiny and poor house we have been staying in. It is sunny. He takes off his coat, then he opens his shirt. He wears nothing under it. He steps under the sunlight and his white skin sparkles…. I gape and he laughs.

"Yours does the same. Look at your hands." Indeed, they too sparkle, as if a million tiny diamonds were embedded in them. More and more inhuman, I see. They are horrible.

"This is the reason why we cannot go out during the day, unless it is cloudy. It could give the secret away."

Damon joins us outside and I am told to exercise, so that I can discover my strength and my speed, and learn to control it. I feel like a circus animal, but I submit. I need to learn what my body is capable of, and learn it fast.

We spend hours like this: Following orders I run, jump, walk slowly at human pace, open the door without breaking the handle, throw a stone, pick a leaf without eradicating the plant, climb a tree… finally the lesson ends. I find that I am not tired at all, which surprises me, but it shouldn't.

Suddenly I hear a sound, and a smell hits me. A beating heart, far away. Blood. I start running down the slope, oblivious of anything but the sound that is calling to me. Finally I see him among the trees, an old peasant, slowly walking uphill. I perceive his thoughts now. He wonders why Alvaro did not show up to help mend his fence, as he had promised. I can feel everything, the sweet liqueur coursing in his veins, drawing me like a magnet. My mouth is full of venom, a strange taste. I am on him so fast that he does not even realize what is happening. I break his neck and I drink. Blissfully.

When I have finished I find that Damon has followed me. "You see," he taunts me, "you are out of control. This is not the way to hunt, you have to use your head before you act. What if somebody saw you? You should have killed any witness too. Well, take the body with you; we'll put him with the other two and set fire to the house. Apart from everything else, the hubby is stinking."

What I see in his mind confirms my understanding:

**For three entire days they left the woman I eventually killed, gagged and bound in her room near the decomposing corpse of her husband, keeping her alive**** and going slowly mad, so that I could have my snack fresh.**

A cold fury, such as I had never felt before, takes me. This is what they are; this is what Damon has made of me. The second after, I am at his throat. He does not expect it and has not the time to scream. Newborn strength and combat training make me unstoppable. I tear at his neck with my teeth, while with my hands I twist his head with all my might. I pull and it is wrenched from the neck. Then I proceed to rip off his arms and his legs.

The harsh tearing sounds I produce fill me with glee, while I notice some silver gray fluid oozing from the pieces. With detached interest I see that the body parts I let fall on the ground are moving. At a snail pace they are trying to re connect. No, this will not do at all. I take Damon's head with me and run uphill. I let it fall under a bush and approach the house cautiously. Guido is on the threshold. He does not know exactly what has happened, but he senses the danger. When he sees me, he crouches in a defensive position, snarling, ready to fight. So am I.

I will not be able to repeat what I did with Damon and take him by surprise, but I have an advantage. I can read his mind. Every time he tries to get me I know in advance, so I sidestep and he grasps only air. We feint and we jump while I try to imagine what a vulnerable point could be. But, of course a male vampire is still male, is he not? I wait for his next move, he misses and my foot crushes into his groin. He bends, momentarily stunned, and I wrench his arm away. Now he is disabled and I have the upper hand. He still fights, but he has lost any effectiveness. I detach his other arm. He tries to run, but I catch him, and finish him off.

Now, I have to focus. I take his head and, going inside the house, I leave it in the kitchen. From the only bedroom, where the two human corpses are, I take a blanket and go down the slope. I pack Damon's body parts in the blanket, fling the peasant's body on my shoulder and go back to the house, collecting Damon's head on my way up.

I pile all corpses, human and vampire alike in the kitchen and l look for something flammable. Oh, grappa, very good. I douse everything with it and add pieces of the kitchen chairs.

Finally I retrieve my backpack and, with my Zippo, I light a makeshift torch and throw it in, setting the kitchen on fire.

Chapter endnotes

Yeah, awful. Vampires in general are not nice. What do you think of this chapter?

The Volturi will never know what had happened. Since Edward has no way to learn about it (nor that he cares), it will not be in the story, but, if you are curious, this is my explanation. Of course Eleazar would have told his masters that Guido and Damon stayed behind in order to change the gifted human they had encountered. When nobody came back, their hypothesis was that the change did not go well, for some reason (in fact, Damon almost killed Edward). The two warriors had a row, fought, one killed the other and then had not the courage to go back to Volterra


	12. Chapter 12 Hunting the doctor

**The Parachutist, by Camilla10**

A/N

**INDIE****, INDIE ! Voting time is on, till March 2nd. As you know, the Parachutist has been nominated for the ****Indie TwiFic Awards**** in the category: Canon or AU story that knocks you off your feet! Work in progress. www theindietwificawards com - You can vote for more than one story in each category, so please vote for me too, if you want. I voted for other stories and it was quite easy.**

Chapter 12 - Hunting the Doctor

I look at the burning house, consuming my killers and my victims. Perfect behavior for a well mannered vampire. Clean up after your shit. OK, I have learned my first lesson.

What will I do, where do I go now? I walk aimlessly from the flames, avoiding roads and cutting through woods, meadows and fields. I don't know where I am going and I don't care. Of course I cannot go back to the army. I would do more damage than a Panzer Division. And I know that I will never see my Bella again. I **must** not see her again. All my promises have no meaning, because I am no longer a man.

I hope that she will think I am dead, as I indeed am, and forget me. She is totally alone now. Maybe she will find somebody else to love her as she deserves to be loved. I take no comfort from this thought.

I feel like crying, and I do, but then I realize I cannot shed tears.

Again I am blinded by rage. In front of me there is an half destroyed hut, empty, its roof caved in. It offends me and I start kicking and battering it. It is just a few minutes and the dust settles on a pile of pulverized brick and stone. I collapse on it, feet bare now, because my boots could not sustain the effort.

All that I lived for, all that made me what I was, is gone.

_My life has been taken from me. _

I have killed two innocents already, and I will surely kill again, such is my nature.

_My humanity has been taken from me. _

I'll never be able to go back to Bella now, lest I drink her blood.

_My love has been taken from me. _

I am a monster walking on legs. "You will never sleep again," they told me, "you will never eat again." And I can't cry.

_My body has been taken from me._

I have nothing. I am nothing. I want to become less than nothing.

I fumble in my pockets and I draw out the cigarette case, letting the cyanide ampoule fall in the palm of my hand, careful not to crush it with this new strength I barely control. I bring my hand to my mouth. I crack the ampoule with my teeth and gulp everything down. Bitter almonds. Right. I hope it is swift...

Nothing happens.

Oh, Christ, they told me, but I could not understand what it really meant. Could not really believe it. But it is true. I am invulnerable, both outside and inside. Nothing can kill me but another vampire. I am immortal.

_Even my death has been taken from me. _

I am lying on the rubble curled up in a ball. I'll not move until thirst overcomes me, and then…. And then I'll do it again. I promise I'll be careful. No reason to hunt me down.

Hang on, idiot. If I am **not **careful those Volturi** will** hunt me down. They will destroy me because I'll be putting the secret at risk. That's what I want. So let me go on a killing spree, leaving bodies scattered around. I'll drink my fill and then they will find me and will send me to hell, where I belong. I'll make it easy for them. I'll do it near Volterra, in full sunlight, glittering like a chorus girl.

I remain there for another day. Unmoving, like a statue. But my brain works full speed. This also has changed. I can think of different things at the same time. I listen to the tiniest noise and process it. A bird over that tree, small rodents down there, a snake sliding under a bush. I hear everything. At the same time I continue to think about going to Volterra and putting my self-destruction plan in action. Then there are memories of my human life…dimmed somehow, but I do my best to remember them. My parents, music, parachuting, the war, Avellino..…. Bella I remember perfectly, I see her sweet face in my mind and I feel a gaping hole where my dead heart is.

… ***…

From the numbness of my spirit another memory emerges and retains my attention. Scent. The two vampires I destroyed had a particular scent, sweet, pleasant, attractive. It is part of our predatory nature, I understand, like carnivorous plants. I remember a similar scent. I make an effort to recall what it was. Oh yes, the scarred doctor I met in Salerno. I thought he used perfume, but now I am not so sure. And I had a glimpse of what he was thinking…now the memory is back, complete, compelling. **He was remembering himself as he leaped gracefully over a deer, and, God, yes, he drank from it**. I had not understood what I was seeing at the time, I was puzzled by it, but I thought it was just a weird dream he was recalling. But now I am sure it was not a dream, but a real memory, and that he really drank the deer's blood! Is it possible that he too was, is, a vampire? Christ, how many of us are there?

I am in a frenzy now, Volterra forgotten. I want to find him. I need to find him. Because Captain Cullen could be my only hope, if he indeed is like me. He can explain things to me. Did he drink the blood of animals when he could not kill a man? Of course he did not want to be discovered but, did he like to drink from animals? And, if he was a vampire, what was he doing masquerading as an army surgeon?

I head South. I can run incredibly fast now and it is the only good thing of my new condition. I avoid obstacles naturally, like a bat. I almost fly. I doubt that I am even visible at this speed. I must find him. Maybe he has answers. I need answers. I am afraid of myself. I have killed twice already, apart from the two vampires who deserved their end. While running, I try to stay away from people. To stay as far from them as possible. It is not too difficult, after all. Fields are untended, nobody works in the woods, and nobody walks the mountain trails I choose to move on. The country is still at war; civilians are afraid and remain mostly at home, in towns and villages.

I will go to the sea, south of Rome. Toward Anzio, where the Allied Forces are stalled after the landing, still pinned on the coastline by the Germans. I will scan the field hospitals and I'll find him.

But the burn in my throat is becoming almost unbearable again. I know that, should I get near a living person today, I would not be able to restrain myself. Maybe in a few days I'll actively seek a living person…

So, whom am I kidding? There is no way I can get near a hospital. People with wounds, bleeding…. I would massacre everybody in sight. But he, if he really is a vampire, doesn't massacre anybody. I need to learn his secret. So I go toward Anzio, moving at night, in the hope of not finding any human on my path.

And I am lucky.

Eventually I find myself in a park, a huge fenced area, with forests, clearings, meadows. From a distance I hear the noise of waves breaking on the shore.

I scan my map, now I can see quite well in the dark, and I realize that I am not far from the supposed goal I now fear to reach. I must be in Castelporziano, south of Ostia. Anzio is not very far. This is the hunting reserve of the Italian Royal family. Well, they are all in Brindisi now. Maybe there will be poachers. If I meet one he will be done for.

I tense, I heard a noise. In moments I am up on a tree. I perch among the branches keeping completely still. Is it here where I kill again?

On my right side, deer. A small herd, moving quickly. On my left side a soft rustle. And then, fast as lightening, a man is over the herd. He is not a man, though, I don't perceive any heartbeat while he grabs one of the deer, pushes it to the ground and, God, yes, he lowers his head to its neck. I can't see his face, only his blond hair, but I know. Unwittingly, Doctor Cullen has found me. I am fascinated, watching him as he drinks.

I slid down from the tree. He realizes he is not alone, lets the carcass fall to the ground and rises to confront me, witness to his feeding. The first thought I perceive is despair. Busted! But then he realizes he can't hear my heartbeat. He inhales and now he knows that I am like him.

I advance two steps, my hands at my sides, open, trying to show that I don't mean any harm.

"Do you remember me?" I say, "I am Edward Masen." He does, I see him recalling our meetings in Salerno. And he is horrified.

"Yes, I remember," he says softly, "my poor boy, what happened to you?" His golden eyes are full of compassion.

I realize that his hideous scars cannot be real, and I also understand the reason for them. Sunlight. There is no way a field doctor can avoid the sun day after day.

"These scars are fake, aren't they?" I ask. He smiles. "Yes, they are a creation of my daughters, Rosalie and Alice. A masterpiece of theatrical make up. I can take them off, and reapply them. And I have more than one set, just in case."

Daughters, he has daughters? In his mind I see two girls, one blond and one with dark short hair, very pale and very beautiful. Vampire daughters.

"You were changed," he insists, "please tell me who did it."

I tell him, explaining that I survived, so to speak, the encounter with the two vampires from Volterra, because I have a gift. I had it as a human, but latent, while now I can read minds all the time. He knows about the Volturi, and also about the third vampire, Eleazar, the one who sensed my potential and left early.

"Yes, Aro collects immortals with talents." he confirms.

He is puzzled that I am all alone and wonders how I escaped, but I don't know how he will take what I have done, so I go back to the main questions I have for him. Why does he hunt animals? How does it work? How can he resist?

"I have chosen not to kill men," he eventually tells me, "from the very beginning and, after trying to starve myself into oblivion, I discovered that I could quench my thirst with animals. My first deer was my salvation."

"So you never killed a human being,?" I ask.

"No, not for feeding." He answers.

"I don't think I can fucking do it." I cry, shame and sorrow making me swear, "should a living man be here, I would forget everything and take his blood. Nothing would stop me."

"Edward, I want to help you," he tells me. "I have to leave, because I have a shift coming, but I can be here tomorrow night. Please don't go away, don't disappear on me, don't let despair win."

And, because he is such a decent person, vampire or not, I promise to wait for him.

Chapter endnote

Before experimenting with cyanide, Edward had not completely understood that nothing can kill a vampire. He thought about an external invulnerability of sort, due to his unbreakable skin. Now he knows better. I hope you liked this chapter, despite its sadness.

Please tell me what you think. I do need some feedback.

Castelporziano is really the best place for hunting, if you are between Anzio and Rome. It belonged to the King and it was forbidden to hunt there. Now that it belongs to the President of the Republic, it is still closed, normal hunters or visitors cannot go in (I could go and see it once, though), but selected animals are taken down and the meat is sold, to help maintaining the Reserve. At that point in time there were no guardians and animals had proliferated, so it is not surprising that Carlisle went hunting there. A coincidence, but not an improbable one.


	13. Chapter 13 A poacher

**The Parachutist**** by Camilla 10**

A/N

**INDIE, INDIE ! ****Voting time is on, till March 2nd. As you know, the Parachutist has been nominated for the ****Indie TwiFic Awards**** in the category: Canon or AU story that knocks you off your feet! Work in progress. www theindietwificawards com - You can vote for more than one story in each category, so please vote for me too, if you want. I voted for other stories and it was quite easy.**

Chapter 13 - A poacher

I go back to my tree. It feels safe to be up here, unseen. I will wait for Carlisle Cullen to tell what he can do for me, if anything can be done. Certainly, he is not a monster like I am. I spend the time recalling my human memories. I don't want to lose them.

I hear some noises and I sense that something is approaching. A lone buck deer.

_I really should try this,_ I think, and jump down from the tree. The deer runs but, I am faster and there is nothing it can do. Keeping it pinned to the ground I try to locate the artery. The smell is not that enticing, but I lower my mouth to it all the same. To cut through its hairy and hard skin feels strange, but no challenge for my teeth. Blood sprouts and I drink.

Once I have finished, I assess the experience. First of all, I am not as thirsty as before. I feel much better, as the burn in my throat has receded to tolerable levels. Still, its blood cannot compare with the human variety, not by far. Could one really get used to it and abstain from men? I don't know. But I would like it to be so.

And come the next night, I can discuss it with Carlisle. Before leaving, he asked me to use his first name. Vampires do not go much for surnames, apparently, unless as a cover up when interacting with humans. Another interesting idea, interacting with humans and not killing them. He can do it.

Then my nemesis arrives. I perceive a heartbeat, coming toward me. I listen, he is not very far. I sense his mind: a poacher, working with nets to capture pheasants and other birds. He is hungry and afraid, but he has been told that surveillance men have run away.

_He is mine._

No, no, no. I fed moments ago, I can resist. I grab the nearest thing, an umbrella pine tree and hang on it desperately, hugging it with all my might. I must resist, I must resist. My mouth is full of venom, I am almost overwhelmed by need…so I sink my dripping teeth in the bark and bite on it. The tree undulates, pinecones falling from its top. My teeth are working the wood, I am better than a chainsaw, Christ, I am felling it.

The severed pine falls down, creating havoc all around. When the noise subsides, the heartbeat is gone. I still hug the stump, fighting the desire to run after the terrified poacher. I must find myself another animal, instead. Three roe deer after I am full, almost nauseous, and go back to the place where I met Carlisle originally. It is amazing how my sense of orientation has developed. I wait for the night.

The doctor is back. I tell him how I managed to spare the poacher and hunt for animals instead. But, I don't want him to have false expectations, so I also confess what I did in the past few days. I had given him no details yesterday. He is not surprised by the fact I killed two humans, what amazes him is that I managed to destroy two mature vampires. In his mind I see that he is not judging me. Newborn's bloodlust and wrath are to be expected, but fighting abilities and the capacity to plan are not common among us. By right I should have succumbed to Damon and Guido.

"You are much stronger and more in control than the average," he tells me," I think that you can fight the call of our nature and regain some of the humanity you have lost. All the members of my coven have done the same."

He tells me his history. The almost incredible fact is that he was born in England in the 17th century. He not only refrained from human blood after he was turned but he also actively choose to help mankind by becoming a doctor, perfecting his skills as learning progressed. He was alone for more than two centuries, studying, practicing, travelling and meeting different vampire covens.

His life changed for the best when he moved to the United States at the beginning of the 20th century. At the end of WW I his solitude finally ended. He had treated a teenager, Esme, and had been smitten by her, but of course nothing could come of it. Then he met her again some years later, broken and dying after an abusive marriage and the loss of her infant son.

Here Carlisle looks at me, and says almost to himself that it is useless to keep the truth from a mind reader, even if he is unveiling other people's privacy. Esme was dying because she had thrown herself from a cliff. Not accepting it, unwilling to lose her again, he had turned her. It was the first time he tasted human blood, and it had been terrible for him to stop drinking, but he had managed. After some time, Esme acknowledged and reciprocated his love, and they married.

The second addition to his coven was beautiful Rosalie. He had been thinking for a long time that he was leaving Esme too alone, while he was pursuing his profession, and had wanted a daughter-companion for her. Rosalie had been raped and left for dead by his drunken fiancée and his friends. Hating to see such a perfect beauty going to waste, he had turned her. She had had enormous difficulties to adapt to her new existence, though. Full of rage, she avenged herself on the men who had raped her. But she did not drink their blood or anybody else's; she hated being a vampire. However, a bond between her and Esme developed, based on the pain of being both childless, Esme having lost her little one and Rosalie because she could never be a mother, now. Eventually, she too found love with Emmett, a hunter who had been mauled by a grizzly. Before he died of his wounds, Rosalie brought him to Carlisle, asking him to turn Emmett for her, which he did. They now shared a lusty and passionate marriage.

"Vampires may look like they are made of stone," he explains, "but we are not. Our senses are enhanced and we experience strong passions. If blood lust is the strongest, the next is just… lust. So there is a lot of sexual interaction between immortals, gender not being a discerning criterion. This is not true for everyone, though. Casual sex, due to my religious upbringing and my beliefs, never had any attraction for me.

But, if we encounter love, then we mate for the eternity, as change comes rarely for us. This is what happened to me and to my children."

He continues, telling me that two additional members came on their own accord. Alice had no memory of her past, when she awakened as a vampire. But, she had a gift: she could see the future. In it she saw her mate-to-be, Jasper, a vampire with an extremely violent past, but sickened by it. She looked for him until she found him. She also saw themselves joining Carlisle's coven, whose lifestyle she had embraced. One day Alice and Jasper came to his door and they became his new 'children'.

"Yes, Edward, he concludes "I have used the word coven, but in reality I consider us six a family. We love and look out for each other. When we deal with humans, Esme and I sometimes pass the others off as adopted children, or as younger brothers and sisters. You can well understand that, because we don't age, we have to change the place where we live, after some years. We all have freely chosen to abstain from human blood and we stick to it. Some of us have been weaker than others, so there have been … lapses, but still we try to do what is best.

I will not lie to you, though, those of my family who have experienced it tell me that the only thing that really sates our thirst is drinking from humans. The need is always there, the ache never goes away completely. However, to abstain offers great rewards."

His plea, afterward, moves me deeply.

"Edward," Carlisle says, "I would like you to be part of my family and I would be proud to call you son.

Now I have something to confess," he adds, "before I left for the war, Alice told me that I could be coming back with another sibling. Her vision changed continuously, so she could not be sure, as the future is not set in stone. Once she even saw that he would not be alone, but that was too blurred. She described somebody much like you and, when we met in Salerno, I wondered if you could be the one. Obviously, I thought that you would arrive to my hospital wounded in action and on the verge of death, and that then I would have to take a decision, doing something I don't do lightly. Besides everything, to keep concealed and then repatriate a new born vampire from Europe was not going to be simple. But now, if you accept my proposal, I must find a way to do it. Not immediately, that is impossible, but eventually, after we liberate Rome and some normalcy ensues."

On one hand, I am drawn by his proposal. He is offering me hope of a sort and the company of creatures that have suffered as I am suffering, and yet have not abandoned themselves to despair and have chosen not to be monsters.

But, on the other, I doubt I am ready for that. And do I deserve it? My self control is tenuous at best. My 'lapses' are not going to be occasional, I fear. So I answer him that I would consider seriously his proposal, which honors me, but I need time to decide.

We speak some more and then he leaves, insisting that I remain here. He will be unable to come for a couple of days but, when he will be back he will bring me new clothes. Mine are worse for wear and even bloodied and I have no shoes. One of the first rules for vampires is to remain inconspicuous. He will bring me cigarettes too. He has taken to smoking because it is such a human thing to do, helping his masquerade. For me there would also be the added benefit of masking other scents. Yeah, I wish….

I muse on his extraordinary personality. He told me that when the war started in Europe he had felt deeply for his country of origin, standing practically alone against Nazism. Nazism had seemed to him the ultimate evil, putting even the cruelest vampires to shame. After Pearl Harbor he held a family meeting, telling them that he wanted, needed to contribute his medical skills to the war effort. Esme and his children supported his decision, with his daughters finding a solution for the sunlight problem.

For the war duration his family was in a very secluded place, where they owned a house. In fact, they owned a number of houses. They were very rich, particularly after Alice's arrival. She could foresee the outcome of most games, and place winning bets. And the same applied to investments. Indeed, due to her warnings, the 1929 crisis left the family's finances intact.

I spend most of the following day running, making an effort to stay inside Castelporziano's boundaries. When I run I feel well, I don't think a lot, letting the powerful machine my body is now taking over.

For this reason I am not aware of the two men until I am almost on top of them.

Chapter endnotes

Who are the men? Will he be able to abstain again? Should he? In the next chapter Edward takes a momentous decision.

I so hope to get reviews and thank everybody who has done it already.

This is an AU story, so I messed up with the Cullens' biography, making the family come together in the '20s, with Esme's change happening immediately after WW I.


	14. Chapter 14 Two poachers

**The Parachutist, b****y Camilla10**

A/N

**INDIE, INDIE ! ****Voting time is still on, till March 2nd. As you know, the Parachutist has been nominated for the ****Indie TwiFic Awards**** in the category: Canon or AU story that knocks you off your feet! Work in progress. www theindietwificawards com - You can vote for more than one story in each category, so please vote for mine too, if you want. I voted for other stories and it was quite easy.**

Chapter 14 - Two poachers

I hear their thoughts. Germans. Two German soldiers who have sneaked away from their camp near Pomezia, walked a couple of miles and intruded into the Royal reservation. Suffering for the quality of the food they are getting, no meat practically, they hope to catch something good to roast. One is experienced and misses his hunting rifle, but his Luger will do, he thinks. He would like to find boar.

The blood coursing in their veins calls to me like music. They are young and full of energy. Oh Carlisle, my friend and would be savior, do I have the strength to run away from them?

But then again, why should I? **They are the soldiers I was sent here to kill**. A few of them I have actually killed, down there near Avellino. They belong to the army of a nation whose leader is preaching, and practicing, the extermination of 'inferior' races, the Jews first among them. Jews like Bella… They are the enemy, my enemy.

I leap and I confront them, growling. The one with the Luger does not think about it. He just shots me, twice, aiming at my chest. The bullets ricochet and fall on the ground.

He is scared now. His companion is frozen at his side.

_"Wer bist du?"_ He rasps, asking who I am.

Hating him feels so good. I grin, showing my teeth.

_"Ich bin das Wesen deiner Alptraumen. Ich bin dein Tod…"_

Christ, I am speaking like I was fucking Count Dracula himself! Did I really say:

'I am the stuff of your nightmares, I am your death…' ?

This is my last coherent thought before instinct prevails and I take them down.

Their blood is divine, how could I think I could do without?

After I have buried their bodies, by simply uprooting a tree, putting a corpse in the hole and then replanting the tree, I spend in meditation the rest of the night and the day after. A plan is developing in my mind. I will not remain cooped up in this park like an animal in a zoo. I will continue my war with other means. With my strength, my teeth and my invulnerability I will kill Germans, better if they are SS, and I will drink their blood. **I will not kill anybody else. **At least I will really try not to. This means that I'll need to be well fed at all times. I'll hunt, and not only game. I'll have cows, horses, pigs, cats, dogs, chicken, rats, even, if it is what it takes.

When Carlisle comes to me again, I tell him about the two German soldiers and what I have decided. I add that once the war ends I will try to find him again. Maybe then I'll be able to embrace fully his lifestyle, but for now I am not ready.

In his mind I see that he is saddened, but, after all, we are in war, and American soldiers do kill the enemy. He repeats again that he hopes I will be able to join his family, and keeps to himself the fear that I will end up as a nomadic vampire, a ruthless murderer of humans, regardless of their nationality.

But, if I really want to follow the course I have prospected to him, he has words of caution. I have to be very careful of my killings. Nobody must suspect that there is a vampire in action. The Volturi have spies everywhere and suspicious deaths will be reported to them. Then, they will hunt me down. He knows them well and he thinks that they are navigating the war prudently, finding many opportunities to make use of it for their ends. Deserters, displaced persons and other human debris can vanish easily and become food. They don't want interferences and will react violently to something out of their control. I am warned.

Before we say good bye he gives me a bundle with clean civilian garments, boots, a carton of cigarettes and…sunglasses. As a final gesture, he takes out his fake scars and shows me his face. An aristocratic one and, of course, very handsome. He looks no older than I am.

I am alone again and now I have to decide where to wage my war. In the meanwhile I need to improve my appearance. I know I look like a tramp and I crave some comfort, if just for a little while.

I eventually leave Castelporziano for good. After a good run, giving a wide berth to the battlegrounds and keeping always under the cover of pinewood forests, I scan my surroundings. Here, before the war, well-to-do people from Rome had their vacation houses, I suppose. The pleasant cottages scattered in the woods and called _villini, _small villas, that is, are all deserted, due to the season and to the battle nearby.

Well, I never did breaking and entering before, but there is always a first time. I select one of the best looking buildings, and find my way inside, breaking the lock of a back door.

Now I go for the bathroom. I am lucky. There is no electricity, but the water is still running. No matter, I will have a cold shower. I get naked and wash myself thoroughly with the soap I found on the tub. There is even shampoo. I don't sweat anymore, but I am dirty, I even have soil and leaves on my hair. The cold water is not unpleasant, as my body is also cold, while I suspect that a hot shower would feel delicious. I am a sort of reptile now. Like them, I can absorb external heat and be warmed for a while.

After I have toweled dry, I look at myself in the big mirror, taking my time. Up to now I only saw my new self in somebody else's mind.

My face and body are very pale, but not exactly white like Carrara's marble. Alabaster, I would say, with just the minimal amount of beige that allows for us not to be detected. Out of the sun, that is. I marvel again at the inhuman smoothness of my skin. I do have a scar though, a thin silvery crescent where my jugular vein is, or was. A souvenir of Damon, to stay with me forever, I suppose. My body too has changed. It is more muscular, its planes better defined, and I have the athletic legs of a runner. Any imperfection I had is now gone.

Yes, there is nothing for it, I resemble a statue more than a man, particularly if I stand still.

However, if I clench my hand in a fist, I see muscles rippling under my hard skin. I was never very hairy and what little I had is still there. My beard has not grown, though, I have no stubble, despite the fact that I have not shaved since I left the farm. My hair is quite unruly, and I don't think barber scissors can easily cut it. My irises, once green, are now ruby red and my lids have a lavender color. I have faint dark circles under my eyes. Ha, it must be the lack of sleep, how funny. No, it is connected with feeding, I know. As I grow hungry the circles will deepen. Carlisle told me that my pupils will stay red for some months, due to the presence of my own blood in my body. Then, if I decide to drink exclusively from animals, they will become golden as his are, otherwise they will stay red. In both cases they'll become almost black when I am hungry, or aroused. Ha, fat chance!

My mouth is also quite red. I bare my very white teeth. At least, no fangs, a small mercy. I can't smell it on myself, of course, but I know that I have an enticing sweet odor, like Damon, Guido and Carlisle, one that will attract human prey. Exactly like our musical voice. Aren't we the perfect predators?

I continue my scan, giving a good look at my groin. My penis hangs limply from its reddish-brown nest of hair. An useless appendage, since I can't piss anymore and I am not going to have sex with another vampire, whatever Carlisle says. Hell, I was chaste as a human, till I found the love of my life. Now I have no life and my love is forever lost to me.

Before I am overwhelmed by self pity, I dress quickly and leave the bathroom. I will dispose of my soiled and ruined garments outside.

I sit in the kitchen and take stock of my belongings. The silk maps, so thin that they don't occupy any space, I can retain for a while, but eventually I'll not need them, once I have studied them well. I find that I have memorized already the one of the area around Rome. I have total recall now. Food emergency rations, not needed. My pistol, nicknamed the 'equalizer' is not needed either, but maybe I can trade it. I might need money sometime, who knows? My knife, I'll keep. My uniform, I don't know, but, yes. First aid, with morphine…not needed. How funny that the medicated bandages are called 'Carlisle bandages' … My dog tags, I'll keep them around my neck, like the good undead American soldier I am. I am pleased that now I can handle objects without crushing them. I am getting much better at controlling my strength.

I explore the house for anything useful. Oh, very good, a half full tin of lighter's fuel. A book or two? Maybe. Bleah, mysteries. Hercules Poirot and Perry Mason, translated into Italian. No, thanks. A battered school edition of La Divina Commedia. Yes. I never managed to read Dante properly. I am sure I'll find the Inferno very tame, compared to my present experiences….

I go in one of the bedrooms and lie on the bed. I will never sleep again, but it feels relaxing. So, what shall I do? Will I try to undermine the strength of German forces keeping the allies at bay on the Anzio shores? Plans form and reform in my mind but I am not sure of my course, taking into account Carlisle's warning.

I spend a full day in the _villino,_ doing nothing, reading a little, trying to figure out an existence bereft of normal human activities. I can't take it in. Again, despair washes over me.

I need to leave and be on the move. As I am still undecided, I give priority to feeding. I must be replete all the time, lest I slip.

Where I am walking in now is a wetland, separated from the sea by woods and a lagoon…Very beautiful. I think the name is Fogliano. And there, almost submerged in the water of a pretty pond, I find some very big animals…water buffaloes.

I disrobe, get into the pond and advance silently. Still, they sense me and are suddenly very nervous. No matter.

After I have killed one and drained it, I am somewhat saddened. It was so beautiful, with its big dark eyes and the black wet muzzle. But pity for animals is not something I can afford, now and never. And it filled me nicely. I carry the carcass on the pond's bank, lest it poisons its waters. That much I can do for its surviving companions. When the dead buffalo will be found, nobody is going to perform an autopsy on it, so I can leave it unburied.

I put on my clothes again and, with no particular reason, I suddenly think that I have my decision. I want to help the partisans, so brave, fighting the Nazis up north. I am a sort of irregular like they are, so it feels just right.

I start my long run toward Northern Italy keeping at bay, absolutely denying, a little, fiery thought: Bella is also there…..

Chapter end notes

Edward is more or less in control of his thirst, after a very short time. He will still feed on enemy soldiers and animals alike, but he will not jump on everybody he sees. This is an AU story and I need it to be so for timeline reasons, but also other authors have taken liberties with newborn blood lust, so I ask you to accept it.

Ah, nude Edward in front of a mirror. I tried to describe the cold disgust he has for his vampiric body. Of course, my feelings are different, sigh. And yours?

In case you are wondering, this chapter and story were mostly written well before I saw the Tarantino's film "Inglorious Basterds". Of course I made sure not to miss it, once it arrived in Italy, since I was writing a story set in the same period and the film presented a anti-Nazi death squad. Dudes, no vampires there but, he is one bloodthirsty Director…. I am humbled.


	15. Chapter 15 Intermezzo

**The Parachutist, by Camilla10**

Chapter note

Well, the voting for the Indie Twific Awards is still on. I so hope to make to the second round. The Parachutist is in the category: Canon or AU story that knocks you off your feet! Work in progress. www theindietwificawards com

This, for me, is a very long chapter, but I could not find a way to split it. It is not in Edward's POV, as it presents the memories of people who met him during the war. They did not know what he was, obviously.

From now on The Parachutist owes a lot to Serendipitous. She accepted to be my sounding board for the follow up, having patiently read the preceding chapters. Thank you, dear.

Chapter 15 - _Intermezzo_

Enrico (1980)

Ah, the war time, you ask me? It is a long time now that I have not dwelled on those memories, my dear boy. We were so young, full of rage and hope. We were going to change everything, a new, perfect Italy was going to resurrect from the ashes… Well, we got rid of Mussolini, for sure, and that was good, but as for perfection … forget it. In any case, my experience in the Resistance was good, I am proud of it. Listening to Bella Ciao is still an emotion. And I made real friends. Some I can call friends to this day, well, the ones who did not die of course, others I lost along the way, different political beliefs, different life experiences after the war. And I met some extraordinary people too. Did I ever tell you about the Phantom?

I don't know why I started to think of him in terms of comic strips. Certainly he did not wear a body suit, and had tinted glasses on his pale face, not a mask .On his head he had a beret, covering his hair. Why I called him that? Maybe because, despite him insisting he was Swiss, I thought he was American, and mysterious. At the beginning, he refused to tell me his real name, saying that any name would do, so I choose to call him Phantom and he laughed. When I was just a _Liceo_ student in Bologna and not a partisan in the mountains, I had loved to read the character's stories on _L'Avventuroso_ magazine. He was an ancestor of your super heroes.

In any case, he saved my ass. The German patrol had surprised me and Rocco disseminating iron nails at a bend of the road winding up to the pass. The idea was to stop and ambush a German supply convoy that would come the day after. Well, we were discovered and a machine gun volley killed my comrade immediately, then they came for me. They wanted me alive. I thought that Rocco had been lucky, because now I was going to be interrogated, tortured maybe, and then hanged, with the _Achtung banditen_ card hung on my neck. I was near the brink of the road, so I decided to jump out of their clutches, even if it was to my death.

However, I did not fall very far, as some bushes stopped me. I just lay there, winded, when I heard cries, another machine gun burst, then noises difficult to define and finally, nothing. I waited and then a man's face popped up from above.

"Do you need a hand to come up?" He asked politely, in a slightly accented Italian, "I do need some help." He proffered his gloved hand. He was not wearing a uniform and I decided to trust him. After all I was a sitting duck, and he could have shot me easily. I climbed carefully and reached his hand. He was very strong, because I found myself hauled up and on the road again. Then I gaped in shock, seeing the _schiwimwagen,_ the German version of a jeep that is, empty and the bodies of the driver and the two patrolmen scattered around. They were dead, apparently. There was no blood, but their necks were bent unnaturally.

"How, how…" I stammered looking uncomprehendingly at my savior.

"There is no time now" he said impatiently, "I am just good at combat, as you can see. Now we need to put the bodies in the vehicle, push it down the ravine and make sure it catches fire. If we are lucky, it will look like an accident. Then you must tell me what you want to do with the body of your comrade."

That gave me pause. I looked at Rocco's bloodied corpse, saddened. I did not think I had the strength to carry him back on my own, nor there was time to bury him properly.

"Fine, I'll bury him for you" he said, "but not now. I'll come back later. But please, carry the body behind those bushes yourself. It is safer." I complied, even more confused. Safer for whom?

Then, together this time, we put the three dead Germans in the jeep and we rolled it to the brink. He took a bottle of lighter fuel from his pocket and sprinkled the liquid over the vehicle, than took a rag and lighted it, throwing it inside, while we gave the final push. His plan worked perfectly, but the falling vehicle produced a lot of noise and it was wise to get away fast.

"If you come tomorrow night I'll tell you where your comrade is buried," he told me. "So you can eventually let his family know. I might have also some information that your brigade would find useful. Not here, though. We should meet at _Prato basso_. I'll find you. Now you had better be going." He walked very quickly toward the bushes above us on the other side of the road and disappeared.

And so it started. We met again, he creeping behind me so silently that I almost had a heart attack. He gave me a very precise description of where I could find Rocco's tomb. He had left signs on the trees and rolled a particularly recognizable rock over it.

"Now, listen, this is important" he added, "the convoy is being delayed, it will not follow the route originally intended, and a search party will be looking for the missing patrol. So none of you should go anywhere near. We can meet again here tomorrow night and hopefully I'll know by then when and on what road the convoy will pass."

I had to speak very seriously with our brigade's commander, at this point. In particular, I had not told him that I was going to meet again the stranger who had saved me, but now I had to tell him everything and let him decide. It was quite a discussion. I was positive that, whatever the Phantom's motivations, this was not a ruse orchestrated by the Germans to infiltrate us and eventually destroy our group. They would have hardly allowed for the killing of three soldiers in order to gain our trust. And those soldiers were well and truly dead; I had touched them and saw their bodies burn.

Well, eventually Nesio was convinced, but he came with me to the meeting, and positioned some comrades nearby, ready to intervene.

The Phantom, true to his nickname, jumped in front of us from a tree and stood still, with his arms raised. "All this is really not necessary," he said, referring to where other men were lurking. Did I tell you that he had a beautiful voice, soft and yet carrying? Like an actor, or like some of the _Radio Londra_ speakers, with their faintly accented Italian.

Nesio was mightily pissed off with him, but he was a fair man, so he asked him to tell us his name and what he thought he was doing.

Not to make this too long, the Phantom's name, as written on his Swiss passport, was Emil Mhülenen. As for what he was doing here, he said that he had personal reasons to try and inflict as much damage to the Germans and the Militia as he could, but those reasons he was not going to disclose. The thing he could offer us was information. He posed as a business man, and had a lot of contacts that gave him access to said information. Then he proceeded to tell us where the convoy would pass tomorrow. He proposed, if Nesio did not trust him, to stay in our camp, with a few men to guard him. If something went wrong, they could shot him. And so he came with us cool as a cucumber, sitting inside the shallow cave we had organized our camp around, and offering cigarettes to everybody. He refused food, saying he had eaten well previously, and, as we had very little to spare, it was fine for us.

The action was a complete success, and after that he become a sort of collateral help to our brigade. In the last months he even took part in some action: he was a deadly shot, with an uncanny ability to dodge bullets. Of course we speculated a lot about him. Some of us thought he was a Swiss Jew, bent on avenging his people, or that he belonged to the Secret Services of some country. But we never knew.

In the terrible winter between 1944 and 1945, when we had all gone underground, I managed to pass the front and join the Italian army fighting alongside the Allies on the other side of the Appennini, so I never saw the Phantom again, but Nesio told me he had seen him till February 1945. After that, we did not have any further news of him. Maybe his luck ended, eventually. Who knows?

Lilì Marlene (1971)

I am sitting on the hard church bench attending the First Communion of my granddaughter Lisa. I wonder what would the other people, the respectable parents of her school mates, think if they knew that her gray haired grandmother, sitting so properly in her blue suit, was once a peroxide blonde working in a whorehouse.

Yes, I used to do the 15 days rounds of the _casini _like the other working girls, once upon a time. Of course, during the war the shifts were mostly discontinued, so I spent more than one year in the _Casa_ in Via della Stoppa. My husband found me there, immediately after the liberation of Bologna. He became a steady client, fell in love and married me, never mind that I already had a daughter, being raised up by my widowed mother, who pretended to ignore what I did to send her money for Paoletta. I had two other sons by him and I would thank God on how my life had turned in, if I believed in God. I also met the love of my life in Via della Stoppa, but him I could not have.

Hell, he was so handsome. He always wore sunglasses, but his face was that of an archangel. His hair was incredible, a bronze color that is practically nonexistent here. And his beautiful mouth was red on his pale skin. I had stopped enjoying sexual intercourse long since but, I would have died of pleasure if only he had touched me with just one finger.

He never did, though. He recruited me, instead.

The first time I saw him I was just recovering from one of the Pig's visits. The pervert liked to hurt women as he could come only in this way. Our _Casa _had rules about that, and it should not have been allowed, but the manager did not want to go on the wrong side of the Germans, so, since the pain inflicted was tolerable, I was asked to tolerate it. He was discretely told to leave me some extra money, apart from what he paid at the counter, and he did. But I hated him.

The Pig liked to brag about what he did in his military life, so he was also a bad, untrustworthy German officer. Some of the things he told me I thought would be quite interesting to the partisans, but I had no idea on how to contact them, and it was dangerous. So I just fumed and dreamed of revenging myself, with no hopes of making it happen.

That evening my name was called again, almost immediately after the Pig had left. Groaning I went with the new client into my room, which was on the first floor.

There he told me to sit down, as he wanted to speak with me. _"Christ, he is a "speaker", one of those freaks who need to babble to get it up." _I thought, and was surprised to see the shadow of a smirk on his mouth, that vanished immediately. It was uncanny, for a while I feared that I had spoken aloud, instead of just thinking it. He had paid for 30 minutes, and, hoping to speed things up, so that he would go away sooner, I reached to help him out of his trousers.

"Please, don't touch me" he said sternly, "and do sit down. I really want to talk and nothing else." I sat down on the bed and took finally a good look at him and saw that he was stunning. And also, I realized, extremely dangerous.

He knew almost everything about me and about the Pig, and he told me that if I was able to make the German reveal important information, he would find a way for it to reach the partisans.

I was scared shitless by this beautiful, cold man who was trying to involve me. I tried to play dumb, but when he said, just said, my daughter's name and my mother's village, I knew I had to go along.

"Listen," I said, "I am in your hands. But I am no Mata Hari. If I ask leading questions I will be suspected. I don't want to be arrested and killed. I cannot. If I die, my daughter will not have anybody to provide for her." At this point I was crying, and I am not a crybaby.

He was silent for a while and then seemed to come to a decision.

Eventually what he wanted me to do was very strange and not so risky. I was not to ask anything directly. I just had to insert in what I said to my clients a short sentence, maybe the name of a place, or a date. That was all. I had to do this with all my German clients who understood Italian, not only with the Pig. A surprising number of them in fact did. I should do the same also with Italians, if they were in the Militia.

"I will come regularly to suggest you what to say" he concluded, and then he proceeded to teach me the things I had to say, waiting patiently until he was sure I would remember them.

"But what use will this be to you?" I asked.

"Very helpful, trust me," was his curt answer, before he left.

After that he came regularly, with the new sets of words or short sentences I had to say to my clients. Sometimes I found it difficult to concentrate, totally captivated by him. I looked at his lips and wondered on how they would feel on mine. I never kissed the men who fucked me, of course. I had kissed Paolo, the stupid boy who managed to get himself killed in the first days of the war, leaving me pregnant. Then there was Ermete, who said he loved me, when I was desperate to procure money to send to my mother. He suggested an easy way to get it. At least, I was bright enough to escape him after a while, and pursue my new life independently, so that what I earned was all mine.

My cold angel said he was Swiss, which explained his faint accent, and the reason why he was free to move around when so many young men were deported to work in Germany, Only the ones well connected with the Party or having jobs essential to the war effort were safe. Still, I could not understand what I was doing for him. It did not make any sense unless he was a telepath and was lurking behind my window while I entertained my clients. See what weird thoughts one can have when falling in love with a mysterious stranger? And I don't believe at all in anything supernatural.

I never questioned him, though, I was so happy to just see him, drinking up his gorgeous face, inhaling his delightful scent and fantasizing about his naked pale body, which I could only imagine and that would never be mine. He clearly did not want me; I was just a whore, while he obviously was somebody important, on a secret mission. Or he was a deluded madman. I did not mind.

The last time I saw him he told me the he would not be coming back for a while and that the Pig was not coming back either, as he was going to be moved somewhere else too. "He'll torment you no more" he said and I detected something like … tenderness in his voice. Maybe it was just compassion. I was crushed by the idea of not seeing him again: "He will torment somebody else, then" I blurted.

"No, believe me, he will not." He grinned, showing his perfect white teeth. I shuddered, elated and frightened at the same time. Was he going to kill the Pig? Had he killed him already, since I had not seen the bastard recently? Then, because I was probably seeing him for the last time, and it did not matter anymore, I ran to him and caressed, just caressed, his cheek. I jolted, his skin was very cold, but my hand was on fire.

"No, Lilì, no," he said softly, then quickly turned and went out of my life.

Nesio (1950)

I am waiting for my wife to be delivered of our first child and my mind wanders on how I came to know her. It was the winter of 1945 and I was sitting companionably outside the _malga _with the Swiss guy, Emil. At least he had a Swiss passport, but of course that did not prove anything. Enrico was dead sure he was American, but in such a case he would be a deserter, and deserters did not behave as he did. It was surprising how he had wormed his way into our brigade. There were so many things that did not add up with him that, by right, he should have been shot first and questioned afterwards. But I did not order it, call it sixth sense, if you are into that, or whatever, and he proved to be incredibly helpful to us. He provided a wealth of useful information. Time after time he came and told us about movements and plans both of the Militia and the Germans, and, more important still, about raids against us or where some of comrades were held prisoners. When the information he had would be helpful to other brigades I let them know of it by means of _staffette,_ once I was sure I could trust him,

Sometimes I felt that when we went into action he was guarding our backs, without showing himself, or that he had been there in advance, smoothing details out, like, for instance, a gate that was meant to be closed was now open. Things like that.

When we had prisoners to question, his help was invaluable. First of all, he spoke German well, while we could only put a few words together, in the rare cases we had a German prisoner. He covered his face with a cotton scarf, when he made himself visible to the men we held, but often he only listened quietly in the background. Then he told us "he is telling the truth," or "he is lying". At the beginning, I thought him fanciful but, many times we had subsequent proof that he had been right on spot and we came to rely on his assessments. He always left before we decided if the prisoner lived to be exchanged, which was seldom, or, more probably, died. We had no prisons, in the mountains.

Once he saved us from committing a crime. One of our_ staffette_ had been betrayed and ambushed by th_e Repubblichini. _She resisted arrest, fearing that they would make her spill, tried to run and was shot. Some evidence pointed to Nando Righi, a neighbor, as the betrayer, and it was decided he was going to pay the price. So we went to his house at night and carried him into the woods. This time also Emil came with us and assisted.

Nando was a pitiful specimen, whimpering and swearing he had nothing to do with the betrayal. True, his cousin was in the Militia, but, albeit Nando knew or suspected Velia's clandestine activities, after all he lived next door, he had not told anything to his relative. He was not convincing at all and his fate was about to be sealed, when Emil asked to have a word with me. We walked some distance and he told me that the guy was innocent.

"Do whatever you want, but he is not the one who betrayed Velia," he said.

"Then who?" I asked.

"I don't know," he said, "but Nando himself might have an idea, albeit he is not sure. You should look at Velia's girlfriends," he added.

Well, I decided to postpone the execution and enquire further into the matter. And we learned that one of Velia's friends, Dora, had gone hysterical after she heard of her death. A couple of days after that she had disappeared from her house and it was said that she had eloped with Nando's cousin, who was married, by the way. So I terrified Nando thoroughly and let him go. He had been blindfolded all the time, and could not recognize us anyway. As for Dora, I promised myself to look for her after the war, but she never resurfaced.

It was some weeks now that I was in hiding. The Allies were stuck on the Appennini and would move again only in the spring. We were not getting messages or supplies anymore and we were told by the Anglo American supreme commander to go home. Ridiculous. So we went into hiding, or tried to pass the front and reach the Allies.

However, Emil managed to find me. Maybe Enrico was right in giving him the Phantom nickname. He had information on some of the German and Militia raids meant to find us. I did my best to pass the information along and some people escaped, in this way. Emil said he was sure that the war would end in the spring, and I hoped he was right. While we smoked in silence, I though what it would mean for me to return to a normal life after the war. Christ, I had even got engaged, before I left home. She was a nice girl. Problem was, I didn't like nice girls, the kind mothers approved of. They bored me to death, and I was sure it would be even more so, after this experience. I wanted a real woman, who knew how life was, how bad things sometimes needed to be done, and capable to call a spade a spade.

When our cigarettes were finished, Emil spoke again, telling me that he was thinking of leaving this area. Here, there was no need of him anymore, he believed. Then, as an afterthought, he added:

"When Bologna is liberated, you will be quite important as a partisan brigade's commander. I would ask you to look out for a person. She was one of my contacts and helped me to gather information. She is a whore and works in the_ Casa_ in Via della Stoppa. Her real name is Gina Cantini but, she uses the name Lilì Marlene, of all things. Gina has been really useful to me, therefore to the Resistance, and I would hate that she is harmed in any way."

I promised to look into it and, after a short while, he went away.

Chapter end notes

If there is anything you do not understand in the above, please ask me. I'll be happy to answer. Or send a review, anyway.

Soo, Edward, vampire and matchmaker. Reading their minds, he thought that Nesio and Gina would be good for each other.

A_ malga _is a mountain hut used in summer by the people bringing cows to pasture.

Since the Nazis recorded everything, there are photos of hanged partisans, decorated with a card with the script _Achtung banditen_ (Watch out, criminals! It was a warning to others, as my kind reader Hermine has pointed out to me).

For her profession Gina had chosen the name of Lilì Marlene, the streetwalker who is the protagonist of a beautiful German song, very famous during the war. The Nazis considered it to be defeatist, and tried to discourage singing it, but it remained extremely popular, not only among German soldiers but also among soldiers of the other side. You can find it on you tube.

Bologna was the less inhibited town in Italy, even in the last century. In a small book she wrote about her war experiences, my late aunt Claudia, who lived in Bologna at that time, told the story of a farmer she knew who married a woman he had met in a _casino_. She gave him many sons and was a perfect housewife. Only, every one or two years, she got the itch, and went back to the whorehouse. This was part of an unwritten prenuptial agreement, evidently. The husband accompanied her there and,15 days later, went to fetch her back to the farm. Nobody in the family, even the sons, had anything to say about it. My aunt adds that "_she had very good friends in the house, and the girls gave her intelligence snippets gathered from their clients, that she passed to the Resistance…."_

Would a poorly educated woman like Gina know about Mata Hari, the beautiful spy executed by the French during WWI? Sure, she had seen the Greta Garbo film.


	16. Chapter 16 Banditen

**The Parachutist, by Camilla10**

**A/N****: ****Last chance to vote for the Indie Twific Award. I so hope to make it to the second round. The Parachutist is in the category: Canon or AU story that knocks you off your feet! Work in progress. www theindietwificawards com**

Chapter 16 - _Banditen_

Early August 1944

I am lurking in my bat-cave. It is a pity that the Batman comics have not reached Italy, so that Enrico has not had the chance to read them, because that nickname would have been appropriate somehow, even more than the Phantom. The rich playboy turned avenger, absconding into a secret den between actions. No majordomo, though. And not that rich, either. I have plenty of money to my name in Philadelphia, but it could be on the moon, as I have no way to get to it. So I steal, from my preys, first of all, and from anybody else, if the opportunity presents itself. Some Nazi officers have a lot of interesting and valuable things in their pockets. One had a lock pick, even, which had me puzzled. It is an item I treasure and keep always with me. My new found dexterity allows me to work well with any tool.

Bologna conceals another city underground, a maze of canals and passages that very few people know of or explore. Padlocked iron gates here and there forbid entrance but, of course the Resistance knows of ways in, and so do I. In a place only I would be able to reach, I have created my vampire lair. Here, first of all, I go to escape sunlight, albeit the porticos that cover a large part of the city's streets are a great help.

Here I find respite from the assault of other people's thoughts, when I am in town and not alone in the relative wilderness of the Appennini. Here, finally, I keep my clothes, rough ones for when I am in the mountains, and a couple of elegant suits, complemented by a grey Borsalino hat, when I pose as a wealthy foreign businessman, seeking distractions (and information) in the few night clubs still surviving, scanning the minds of their patrons. I have even an _SS Obersturmfürer_ uniform, which has had its uses and is no longer needed by its previous owner. I cannot enjoy the comfort of a warm shower, of course, but some of the underground canals are pretty clean, and I use their water to wash myself when I need it. Once or twice I have gone to the public baths near the station but, I don't want to be remembered or set up a routine.

Inside my refuge I have excavated a dry pit, and there I throw the corpses of the men I feed on, covering them with quicklime, whose ingredients I have assembled. It helps, because I have a very sensitive nose.

Things have worked quite differently from how I thought they would when I came here. I have been in contact with the partisans since April. On arrival, I spied on some of the brigades in the Appennino Emiliano, approaching their camps at night, listening to their voices and to their minds and trying to select one that would allow for me to become a supporter, if not a member. Eventually, I found that the Brigade "Pino Barbagallo" could be the right one, mainly due to the mindset of its commander, Nesio. He had a streak of originality that could make him accept a dubious character like the one I was going to impersonate.

Unseen, I followed him and his comrades around, looking for an opportunity to introduce myself and eventually I managed to save Enrico, one of his men, with the added benefit that he did not see me using my speed and strength to eliminate the German patrol that was about to capture him. He was surprised, but also grateful, and we progressed from there.

In the meanwhile, as a sort of precaution, I had procured a fake Swiss passport, bearing the name of Emil Mhülenen. I had enough booty from my Nazi preys to be able to convince a seedy forger to make one for me. I did not trust him an inch, but I think I scared him enough to get value for my hard stolen money.

To be able to move freely around the city, with a protected identity if challenged, has been beneficial, because what I have to offer to the partisans is intelligence, more than anything else. I thought I was going to participate actively in guerrilla warfare, but this was not to be, I soon realized. First of all, the partisans are more concerned with fighting the Militia of the Social Republic than the Germans, and the Germans consider them annoying wasps, to be swatted when they come too near, not a priority. Direct confrontations between the two, as in the case of the supply convoy are relatively rare, therefore. I don't mind to have the _Repubblichini_ as main objective, of course, they are the enemy too. But I will not drink from any Italian.

Secondarily, when Germans are ambushed and killed, deadly retaliation may follow, in the measure of ten Italians for one dead German, as it has happened last March, with the Fosse Ardeatine massacre of civilians in Rome, after the bombing of a German platoon. So what the partisans do is mostly sabotage, and I am helping with it. Information is the key and I am very good at gathering that. I can listen behind walls, I can perch unseen behind closed windows and I can read minds. I have even recruited some people myself. And then, when a sabotage action is decided, I do advance scouting and rearguard protection. I cannot fight alongside them, though. If I did, I could only use human weapons. The damn secret must be kept.

Sure, I do kill my Nazis, but not as part of my support to the partisans' strategy. And I make the bodies disappear in the subterranean pit, so that nobody really knows what happened to them. They could even have deserted, as far as the German Command knows. In this way I hope to avoid innocent civilians paying for what I am doing. And I must be careful of escaping the Volturi's attention too.

Yes, I feed on Germans, as I promised myself I would do. I try to choose wisely, inflicting minute but stinging damage to the enemy's ranks, or just making sure that there is one monster less to walk this Earth, barring yours truly.

I also hunt animals in the mountains, however, trying to remain satiated at all times, thus ensuring my self control. It works quite well. I have sat with my comrades in their camp, surrounded by their mouth-venoming scent, without killing anybody. Carlisle's suggestion that I smoke to look more human has been a precious one, particularly because it is true that the smoke dulls my sense of smell a little, and that helps. Therefore I always have cigarettes with me, and I offer them generously, one of the reasons I need money, as often they are only to be found on the black market. Another, of course, is that I am now a regular customer at one of the best whorehouses in town. A very chaste customer, to be sure, but still.

I went there the first time because I was following the _SS Sturmbannführer_ Otto Schultz, aiming at a close encounter with him in my subterranean place. His mind was so repugnant that I was really looking forward to it, intending to keep him fully aware of what was happening to him. In general I don't drain my victims when they are awake, not so much for pity, but because their thoughts are disturbing. And, of course, if they are not trashing around, it is easier for me to keep my clothes neat.

However, the Nazi officer stopped to visit a _casino _and I had to decide whether I wanted to wait for him or find somebody else. It depended on how long he was going to stay. Circling around the building till I was in the back alley, I found his mind again and that of the woman he was tormenting, in a room on the first floor. I considered fleetingly to jump, break the window shutters, always closed according to law, and take him with me, never mind the consequences, but then I had a better idea: I decided to let him live for the time being and visit the woman after he had left. So I set foot in a whorehouse, for the first time ever, both in my life and un-life.

My partnership with Lilì Marlene worked well for some time, she really hated the Germans and liked the idea of doing something to help the Resistance. She was puzzled by what I made her do, and she did touch on the idea that maybe I was a mind reader, but she did not dwell on it for long. Lilì is nothing but down to earth.

However, our short meetings, needed so that I can feed her new mind-triggering words, have became more and more embarrassing. She has fallen in love with me, or at least she believes she has, and when I am with her, her fantasies are increasingly explicit. That she can still desire a man despite her profession, I find surprising. Plus, I cannot fathom why she finds me attractive beyond my vampire lures, that work just up to a point, and then people become frightened.

Despite the fact that I am now exposed to sexual fantasies and even sexual acts in the minds of the people surrounding me wherever I go, I am unaffected by them. I find my cold body deeply distasteful, and nothing in me stirs, which is just as well, because any intimacy would surely not end positively for Lilì. Self control can just go so far. It would be a pity; I like her as a person, no matter what she does. So I am going to terminate our relationship, and, as a parting gift, I am going to terminate Otto's life too. He is about to leave Bologna anyway and he will not trouble her, or any other woman, anymore.

Endnotes

Edward seems adjusted to the existence he is leading in this phase. Cold, sarcastic, rational and … deadly. He is deluding himself. There is a major flaw in what he is doing. Only, he has not realized it yet. When that finally happens, he will be devastated. And it will be a good thing. Do you see what the problem is? Tell me in a review, or review anyway.

Batman, originally referred to as the Bat-Man, was co-created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger, appearing in publications by DC Comics after May 1939. Batman arrived in Italy only after the war.

Do you like the idea of Edward with a Borsalino hat? You can see a hat (sans Edward) at http://www(.)counterfeitchic(.)com/Images/Borsalino_hat_ I find it difficult to imagine Rob Pattinson with one on his lovely messy head but, it is a fact that when I look at family photos of the period, men always wore a hat when in town. My father's family relative wealth came from selling hats, particularly the Borsalino ones, manufactured in Alessandria (Piedmont) and I wanted to remember that.

_Obersturmfürer_ is a Lieutenant, _Sturmbannführer _ is a Major.

The wooden blinds of the _casini'_s windows had to stay closed at all times, for decency's sake. Accordingly, another nickname for them was _Case Chiuse_ (Closed Houses).


	17. Chapter 17 Repentance

**The Parachutist, by Camilla10**

Chapter 17– Repentance/ Historical update

_Der Tod macht mich nicht beben_

_Nur meine Mutter dauert mich;_

_Sie stirbt vor Gram ganz sicherlich_

(I don't fear death, only, I am

sorry for my mother, who will

surely die of grief)

The Magic Flute by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder

Part one – Repentance

Late August 1944

I am running out of this small station near Bologna, carrying the wounded comrade to the ruins of the_ Ospedale Maggiore_, the main hospital of the city, that is, where a clandestine infirmary is operating. The action to sabotage the special train in transit had not gone well, and the partisans had to retreat, leaving two men on the terrain. The Germans' arrival was so fast that it surprised even me, in my concealed rearguard position. Unseen, I was able to carry out one of the fallen men. His heart is still beating, so I am trying to save him. His condition does not seem desperate and his pulse is regular, if faint. The smell of his blood is very disturbing, though. It is some time since I fed, so I stop breathing, knowing that I have to be very quick about this or I might succumb to bloodlust and kill the one I am trying to save.

I run at vampire speed toward the ruins and, once I am there, I lower carefully my burden to the ground and retreat a little. Ah, better. Breathing again, I whistle the password tune that should draw some people out and have them take care of the wounded man.

I turn to leave, when a voice calls to me in German. Hell, I have been seen, and what is worst, the secret infirmary could be discovered. I walk toward the two enemy soldiers on patrol duty, raising my arms in surrender. They relax infinitesimally and I jump them, so fast that they have not the time to shoot. I wrench their weapons out of their grips while stunning them with two light slaps. Then I twist the neck of one but, I think that the other will do me nicely. I am very thirsty now and I cannot be choosy. He is German and it is enough for me.

So I carry the living and the dead into my subterranean den. The corpse I throw into the pit, not before taking his wallet and his weapons. After that, I satisfy my thirst with the other one, who is still senseless. No reason to awaken him. When he is dead and drained, I empty his pockets, to see if there is money or anything else that can be useful to me. Not much. His name was Egon Christmann. I find a piece of paper, folded many times. I make the mistake of unfolding and reading it. Time stops.

It is a letter, directed to his mother.

_Liebe Mutter,_ it says,

_You will never read my words. Once this letter is finished I'll burn It, because it cannot be sent. Should it be seen by the censors, it would surely condemn me, you and the rest of our family. But I want to tell the truth, if only for the time I need to finish writing it. I would like to scream it aloud, to make everybody listen. But nobody would, I know._

_Our country has lost its soul, following a criminal that is also completely crazy._

_A few days ago the SS-Panzergrenadier-Division Reichsführer descended on a small town, Sant'Anna di Stazzema, on the other side of the Appennini toward the sea, and massacred over five hundred civilians. They were mostly women, children and old people. It was not in direct retaliation for some partisan's action, it was just a sort of preventive measure. This I have not seen with my eyes, but everybody is speaking of it. With my own eyes, while on guard duty in the station of Bologna, I have seen cattle trains passing through, directed to Verona and the Brennerpass. They were crammed full of Jews, with no water and no food, being taken to concentration camps. The stench, the pitiful cries for water... I will never forget the horror of it._

_I don't know if I will see the end of the war, which I think we are losing, a fact that makes me glad. Only by paying the full price of total defeat can Germany atone for its crimes._

_I am steeling myself to resist, if I am given orders that are not morally acceptable, and that will mean death. But, if I survive, I will try to do something to redress……._

The letter ends here. It is not finished and now it will never be.

After reading, I am paralyzed by self disgust and shame. I choose to drink from a man whom I could have called a friend in another life. A much better man than me, when I was human. Now, of course, I am a beast.

The full impact of what I am doing hits me, because I finally see things as they really are. Indeed I am a monster, and a hypocritical one, at that. Having my cake and eating it, literally. In Castelporziano my choice had seemed to me rational, elegant even. Continuing to fight the enemies I had been sent here to kill. Feeding only from Germans. Being a resistance hero and a vampire, the best of two worlds. I feel like throwing up, but the blood I ingested cannot go back where it was. I sucked him dry and his heart will not beat anymore. Had I met Egon on the battlefield when I was living, he could have killed me or I could have killed him. This is what happens in a war. But, in making food of him, I have dishonored both of us, not treating him like a man, but like a thing I could use for my pleasure.

Yes, pleasure, since I know perfectly that I can drink from animals and be sustained, but human blood is so much more satisfying... it gives such a physical release … it gives such a power And mine is not an uncontrolled frenzy now. I plan, I wait, I cover my tracks, I feast at leisure.

Kneeling near his still body, I sob over him and over what I am. Despite the fact that now I have acquired self control to a large extent, I have continued to drink human blood, because I could, because I enjoyed it… It is hopeless, I am hopeless…

When, hours later, I emerge from the depth of my despair, I know that I have only two paths before me. I can go on being the predator I am designed to be, forgetting about everything but bloodlust, the difference between Germans and non Germans totally irrelevant, any man or woman will do, thus embracing forever the loathsome creature I have been turned into.

Or I must defeat the call of my nature and try to regain what I can of my lost humanity.

**This means that I should not drink anymore from any ****living person, whatever the cost, whatever the desire**. I know that this is the road I must choose. The road I want to choose, or I am damned to a living hell while still walking this earth. I don't want to be a monster.

"Egon," I say to the corpse, "forgive me. I cannot forgive myself but, I swear, you are the last human being I killed for his blood." I notice a simple gold ring on his right hand, which is now as white as mine. It bears his monogram 'EC' written in Gothic.

I take the ring off from his finger and slid it into mine. It fits. "So that I don't forget you and my promise, forever." I add.

I also keep the unsent letter. Maybe, after the war, supposing his mother is still living... or maybe not…. I don't know, I can't think that far.

His body will go into the pit, like the others before him, albeit l wish I could burn it on a pyre, like Siegfried, like the ancient heroes of his country. It is not possible, unfortunately.

It takes me some time to be again on the move, afterward. I will continue to help the partisans, because they need all the help they can get. I might kill again, I know. The war has not ended yet. But not for feeding. If I succeed in keeping faith with my promise, I'll seek Carlisle Cullen, when the war ends.

Part two - The Allies are coming…or not?

September – November 1944

_Perhaps the most spectacular fighting of that raw, rainy autumn took place on three craggy mountain peaks in late September and early October. On 27 September, elements of the 350th Infantry Regiment linked up with Italian partisans and occupied Mt. Battaglia without opposition. However, over the next six days, the "Green Devils" of the German 1st Parachute Division attacked fiercely and without surcease in an effort to seize this key terrain. Their efforts were in vain, however, as the 350th committed everything it had, including headquarters clerks, and threw back every assault to retain the critical mountain top._

……

_Opposed by elements of the Luftwaffe's elite , the 88th slugged forward through seemingly endless mountains toward the Po Plain. In the total of 44 days of rain, mud, terror, ferocity, and blood that was the campaign in the North Appenines for the Blue Devils, there were many tactical victories, but no ultimate operational success. Like the rest of the fighting elements of the Fifth Army, the Division's soldiers were just too exhau__sted to push further. Company G. 351st came closest to breaking through, but was literally wiped out at Vedriano, on the very verge of the Po Valley southeast of Bologna, on 24 October. _

From "World War II Historical Overview – The Blue devils in Italy." http://www.

Chapter endnote

This chapter is rather short, I know, but significant, I hope.

So, what do you think of Edward's repentance? Please send me a review.

Finally Edward has come full circle: he is choosing to be a vegetarian vampire now, if not a pacifist one. But the most difficult test will come if, when, he will have his human love again in his arms.

The massacre of Sant'Anna di Stazzema has been described by Spike Lee in a controversial film I have not seen, as reviews were not that enthusiastic.

The historical quote explains what will be Edward's frame of mind in the next chapter.


	18. Chapter 18 Taken!

**The parachutist, by Camilla10**

Chapter note

_On 13 November 1944 the Allies broadcasted a proclamation__, signed by General Alexander, Commander of the inter-allied forces in Italy. This declared that the Allied offensive was over and gave instructions to the partisan formations to disband in view of the coming winter and to return to their homes and await further instructions. ............ However, the allied command quickly realized that they had committed a serious error_…..

(Resistance in Western Europe, by Bob Moore)

Chapter 18 - Taken!

March 1945

I perch on a tree after hunting, musing on the fortunes of war. The Anglo-American forces, complemented by a Brazilian Battalion of all things, have not advanced since November. Before that I had spent time in the mountains, doing what I could, as it had seemed both to me and to the resistance fighters that the best course was to help the allies to cross over and get to Bologna and the Po river valley as soon as possible. Ironically enough, I had used human weapons, because I could not be seen by my comrades fighting with my very special and more effective ones. The awful weather helped me to be around during the day and the fact that enemy fire left me unscathed every time was ascribed to my incredible luck. At night I spied on the Germans and reported the information I gathered. Of course I avoided direct contact with Allied soldiers, the presence of a pale American with the partisans would have caused questions.

But, eventually, the advance stopped.

In early November I took part in the so called Battle of Porta Lame, fought inside Bologna, between the Lame Gate, the Ospedale Maggiore and the Bolognina, a workers' neighborhood. Brigades from the Appennini had joined the Partisan's Action Groups operating in town for what was supposed to be the dress rehearsal of a general insurrection. The Germans had used even an armored tank, to no avail. We won. At the end of the day we had lost 17 men and they about 200. Another push, and Bologna would be ours.

However, a few days after that, the Alexander's Proclamation changed everything. How could the Allied Command think that partisans could go home like it was nothing, or survive the winter in the mountains with no supplies? If they went home, somebody was sure to come and look for them. Those who were able to filtered through the front and joined the Anglo American Forces or the Italian loyalist army on the other side, waiting with them.

The worst thing was that now the Germans knew that they did not need to worry about the Allies resuming operations during the winter, so they were free to move some divisions to other war theaters, to better protect Germany's borders. In the meanwhile, all the "Free Republics", the areas taken by the partisans and controlled by them, had been retaken, one by one, and deadly punishment followed swiftly.

Many of my comrades think, and it is difficult not to think it, that the British Government, but maybe even the US one at this point, do not want the partisans, particularly the Republican and Communist ones, to play too big a role in Italy's liberation. And, in general terms, it is now clear that the Allies are not particularly interested to win the war here in Italy. After the landing in Normandy this theater is not strategic anymore.

So, nothing much is happening now, at least here in the Appennini. The only hope for most of the people in the Resistance is to remain hidden until, hopefully, the Allies will give the final push. I continue to gather information, trying to know in advance about punitive expeditions, either from the SS or the Militia, thus helping my friends to avoid capture. Every day, however, there is bad news.

Partisans are found, arrested, executed. The proclamation of General Alexander has been disastrous indeed.

During the winter my eyes changed color. I was true to my promise and now they are amber like Carlisle's. I am finally free not to use tinted glasses. I have also learned to coexist with the muted burn in my throat, the burn that, I know, only human blood would make completely disappear, at least for a while. But I welcome the pain, I have much to atone for.

I hunt, but I have a lot of time on my hands, and so I think. Too much. What will I do when the war ends, at least here in Europe?

When I contemplate my future, I can't imagine it. Will I be able to resurface, at least for a short time, disentangle myself from the Army, go back to America? I don't know. I don't know what I want.

The truth is that I am thinking of her. All the time. For months I did not allow my mind to dwell on Bella. I was a revolting monster and even my thoughts would defile her. I felt the gaping hole in my chest and refused to acknowledge what it meant. But now I am trying to be better, so even if I can't see her again, at least I can remember her. Plus, I am obsessing about the fact that she could be found, that the farm is no longer a safe place. Too many resistance supporters have been arrested and killed in the last weeks. I know that I could keep her safe and protected until Bologna is liberated, but how can I show myself to her?

Finally, I cannot stand it anymore. I'll go to the farm, keep myself invisible and monitor the situation. If I see danger coming, I'll be able to save her, consequences be damned.

My legs bring me where I want to go almost without registering that I am running. But, once I am finally there, I feel that something is wrong even before I see the farm. Too much silence.

It has been devastated. I am too late.

Despair washes over me. The barn, with its wooden loft has burned almost completely, the roof collapsed. The house, made of bricks and stones, fared better. It is all blackened, the windows shattered, but it is standing. I get inside and climb to the first floor. The acrid smell of smoke pervades everything. I know where Bella's little room was, even if I have never been here. The door is open, everything is in order, so she was not here when …

Draped on a chair I see her green shawl, the one she crocheted during the long evenings we spent in the kitchen. Before I know, I have taken it, pressed it to my face. I smell smoke first, then… her.

I run from her room taking the shawl with me. Outside, I see something, dangling from the tool shed's protruding lintel. A piece of rope. It has been cut, but somebody was hanged here.

There is nothing living left in the farm, no animals, no people. I run away, chased by demons … if she is dead… only a bloodbath would give me release, and then let the Volturi come and dispose of me.

My feet have brought me to Saint Mary of Peace. Me playing Verdi, so happy despite the fact that it was a funeral. Bella waiting for me when I was going back to the farm. Our first kiss ….

From a window I see Don Luigi in his kitchen. I can't help myself and knock lightly on the glass. He jumps, but then comes to the window and opens it.

He recognizes me.

"Edward, you are alive! Come inside!" We go in his office, where the shutters are drawn, so he switches the light on.

"Bepi and Marco did not know what had happened to you when you missed the appointment. They thought that you had been captured, and now you were in some prison camp … _or dead_." He just thinks the final word. In his mind I see the destroyed farm, but he doesn't know if I know and does not want to tell me.

He wonders why, how I am here, but I have no time for this.

"Don Luigi, I was at the Morellis. What happened?"

"The Repubblichini came. They were looking for Isetta, well, for Bella, they knew she was there. Somebody denounced her. Morelli was hanged. I buried him yesterday." I see the memory of him with other people, creeping at night into the courtyard and cutting the rope, lowering the body on the ground and then carrying it out with the same handcart which – oh, Christ – Bella and I used to take milk to the dairy hut.

"Where do you think she is, now?" He knows that I am speaking of Bella.

"She must have been taken by the SS to their prison of San Giovanni al Monte, I don't think she is at the _Caserme Rosse_, those are used more for detaining war prisoners and the workers destined for deportation," he answers, "but she might be already on a train."

I have the feeling that to extract her from a train would be easier than from a heavily guarded and secure prison.

"What do you know of the deportation trains?" I ask him.

Fifteen minutes later I am running to Bologna. It is night already. Deportation trains now come from Turin and Milan, pick other prisoners in Bologna, pass through Verona, where the Reich's High Command in Italy is now sited and then proceed to Bolzano, where there is a concentration camp, and, eventually, to the Brenner Pass and Austria.

I pray to a God I stopped believing in a long time ago to make me find her, to make me save her.

When I left, Don Luigi had asked me how was I thinking I could free her.

"I will." I had answered, and I had looked him straight in the face. I saw his eyes narrow, like he was realizing for the first time how much I had changed, how inhuman I was.

Confused images came to his mind, mirroring the confusion he felt. Then he had checked himself, firmly shutting the lid on legends and myths he would not acknowledge or even dwell upon. The monsters he had decided to fight against were made of flesh and blood and, sensing I was completely on his side, whatever I was, he was going to help me. "If you succeed in freeing her," he told me, "then I have a place you can bring her to. Go to the Parish of Santa Giusta in Verona. Don Pietro will help her." Her, not me. He knew by instinct that I don't need any help.

I reach the Bologna's station and I approach the building that hosts the stationmaster and his staff and start listening. However, nobody is thinking about what I want to know. I decide to take the risk to ask somebody a direct question. After all, railways workers are known to be very sympathetic to the Resistance. One of the railways employees is outside the building, smoking.

I take out a cigarette myself, and ask for fire. After a while I speak.

"A friend of mine has been arrested, and could have been deported to work in Germany. Did one of those trains depart recently?" He looks at me suspiciously, but now I have him focusing, so I can see. "_Who the hell is this guy? Yes, one of those wretched trains departed from Bologna two hours ago_," he is thinking_, "after many days that we have not seen one, which is a relief. Please God, it could be the last one."_

"Never mind," I tell him, and go away quickly.

Chapter endnotes

Reviews?

I had not realized, till Serendipitous made me notice it, that in the two preceding chapters there is no mention of Bella in Edward's POV. It was not completely intentional (the damn characters do what they want) but, I think I know the reason why and in this chapter I explain it.

I have taken some liberties with the timeline. Probably the last deportation train left Bologna earlier than late March, but I could not get exact dates and what the hell, I need this to be so.


	19. Chapter 19 The train

**The Parachutist, by Camilla10**

A/N.

I am writing only the minimum indispensable about the cattle train. The reality was so awful that I find it difficult to dwell on it. I am writing a fantasy story for fun, and there is nothing funny about the Holocaust. On the Internet you can find plenty of information about Jews' deportation from Italy and other countries, and how it was.

Chapter 19- The train

I have found the train and now I am running after it. It isn't going very fast, so I am relaxing. I can easily keep following it. Hell, I could even overcome it. Now I only need it to slow down. If this does not happen soon, I can try to fell a tree and roll it on the rails. At the train head and the open part at the end of each wagon there is a SS with a machine gun. I'll get rid of them. It will be a pleasure, even if I am not interested in their blood. But first I have to discover where Bella is, of course. If she is here I must find her. I have never read her mind, so I don't think I'll be able to identify her.

When we are approaching Verona, the train is finally slowing down. Then in the distance I hear the rumble of planes and I was never happier to hear this sound. I can even hear the air raid alarm's shrill noise resounding in the distant city. The train has stopped completely now. It will not pass through the Verona's station, if there is a risk of being bombed. We are in the middle of the countryside and the night is quite dark.

Now!

I put my boots in my rucksack and leap soundlessly on the first wagon roof. From inside the wagon there are many terrible sounds coming. People are crying and screaming for help. I start scanning the minds inside. Awful to listen to, but nothing I can recognize. I leap on the second wagon. All women here. Nothing again…No, wait. From the mind of somebody I sense pity. _So young, so pretty,_ the woman is thinking and, with her eyes, I see a face.

Bella. Here.

A moment later I am on top of the SS in front of the wagon, breaking his neck. He crumbles. I go on the top again and take care of the SS on the back, then of the one on the next wagon. I continue till the end of the train. Now I am back on the second wagon. The sliding door closing it is heavily padlocked. I get to the ground then jump on the door feet forward and it cracks open.

"_Scappate, scappate,"_ I cry, telling them to run away. Slowly, bewildered, the women start pouring out. I know that time is short. I put Bella's shawl to my nose and inhale deeply. I look at the shadows of the running women and finally I recognize her scent. Smell is better than sight, even if I have night vision. And here she is. I gather her in my arms and take off toward Verona. I wonder how the other runaways will fare, but I am too selfish to do anything about it. My priority is in my arms.

Bella is not resisting at all while I am running away with her. Obviously anything is preferable to the train. And whomever managed to free her and the other prisoners in her wagon is not an enemy, she must be thinking. I can only suppose so, because I discover I cannot read her mind at all. Her thoughts are a blank to me.

She now asks who I am. Keeping my voice very low, trying to mask how much it has changed, I murmur:

"Bella it is me…Edward." She passes her hand lightly on my face and my breath catches. So warm… Evidently reassured by her touch, as my bone structure has not been altered beyond recognition, she says:

"My god, you are freezing". I answer that I am fine. Then she asks where the others are, as she surely believes that this has been a group action. I lie and tell that we have decided to scatter, everybody on his own, as it'll make it easier to disappear.

I have gotten far enough from the railway, but now I have to find the church. And I should do it quickly.

"Bella," I say, "I have to run faster, please close your eyes. It will feel strange, but don't worry. You'll be safe." She reclines her head on my chest and sighs.

I run on, moderate vampire speed this time; the streets of Verona's periphery are deserted, since the air raid alarm is still sounding. In Don Luigi's mind I saw the church's whereabouts and I think I can find it. While I run, I try not to dwell on her sweet scent, I try not to listen to her heart beat, nor to feel the blood coursing in her veins and I must have become much better at this, because I am still in control, at least for the moment. And I have her, I snatched her back from the SS, she is warm in my arms, alive.. I know that as soon as I have found a permanent haven for her, I will have to leave. No, I will not think about it. Not now, she is not safe yet.

Here is the church of Santa Giusta and here is the back door to the priest house. I knock, a priest opens, and, without hesitating, allows us inside.

Bella is very tired, I notice that she can barely stand on her feet, when I put her down.

"She was on a train to Bolzano," I explain. "I managed to free her when the train stopped. She needs a safe place to stay. Don Luigi Ronchi told me to come to you."

No other explanations are necessary. I see in his mind that he is used to hosting other people on the run, the same as us. He is puzzled by the fact that I have freed her, and wonders how I did it, but he is used to operating on a need-to-know basis, and does not ask.

"This is not a very safe place, anymore, I fear," he tells us. I see him remembering a visit the Militia paid to him a few days ago. It was not clear what they wanted, and they left, eventually, but they might return at any time. The Church's power protects him only up to a point.

"For this night it is fine, but tomorrow we'll need to find something else for you," he adds. "Come into the kitchen." There he lights a very faint bulb, making sure that the dark curtains are closed, and pours some milk from a glass bottle into a pan, putting it on a gas ring. Once warmed, he offers it to Bella. She takes the cup and gulps the milk down. She staggers and is trembling all over. Delayed reaction, surely.

"She should lie down," he says, and takes us to a small room with a single bed and some blankets. I take off her shoes and cover her with the blankets.

"Sleep now, _tesoro,_" I whisper. I'll keep you safe. Tomorrow we will speak…"

_Yes, love, tomorrow you'll see better how I really look, tomorrow you'll see better the monster I have become._ She touches my face with a ghost caress.

"My Edward," she murmurs, but she is falling asleep.

To reassure the priest about any improper behavior – something did cross his mind - I tell him that I'll just sleep on the floor. I am used to worse things, I add, and no, I don't need a bed, I don't need anything to drink either, I am fine. He leaves us.

I want her to sleep. I don't want her near me. To have her in my arms while I ran was divine. It was hell.

I am basking in her scent that now feels much stronger to my enhanced senses. Floral, delicious. I wish I knew flowers better, because I have no names I can identify. I hear her heart, calmer now, but thumping so strongly before, when I ran. Fear first, followed by elation, when she realized it was me. At least it is what I think, because her mind is a closed book. I find I must have moved, as my head is leaning on the bed frame. Too near her, dammit. I hear her blood pumping. Too near, too near. I move and sit against the wall, far from her.

Did she realize how fast I was running? Did she realize how cold and hard my body is? What will she do when she sees how different I am now? My throat aches. I cannot stay here. It is too dangerous, I am getting thirsty. This is my delayed reaction: I am losing my control.

I leave the room silently. Don Pietro must have gone to bed long since. I reach the door that leads outside. It is a very simple lock and I will be able to open it again when I am back. I must hunt.

After one hour, I haven't found anything. I don't want to go very far but, I cannot go back to her in this state. A moment of weakness and she is dead. I am now near the place where the German high command in Verona is and where prisoners are brought, to be interrogated, tortured, killed. Had I not foresworn human blood, I could feed here. Better a German soldier than Bella, surely. There are sentinels outside. So easy.

No.

I circle around the building, and then I perceive a particular smell. Dogs. There must be a kennel somewhere. There, behind that gate. I retreat and then run toward the wall. When I run so fast I know I am practically invisible. Before the sentinels perceive the movement, I have leaped over the wall, barbed wire tearing my pants a little, and I am inside an empty courtyard. I scan the minds outside. Nobody has seen me. The dog's smell is stronger here. Ha, there is an inner courtyard. I leap again on top of the next wall and I see them. Six Dobermans. They have seen me too, but they don't bark. They are trained to be silent and to attack without a sound. They are the SS' best friends, aren't they? Very good, my beauties, here I come. I love it when they jump me savagely, going for my throat. Up to now I have hunted mostly gentle animals, unable to fight back. I would like the dogs to discover slowly that this time they are helpless and how it feels but, I don't want them to mess up my clothes, so I start snapping their necks or their spines. And then, one by one, I drink them dry.

To go back to Santa Giusta is not a problem. In two leaps I am outside the two courtyards and then it is a short run. I open the door with my pick lock and go back to Bella's room, sitting again on the floor, keeping my vigil. Her sleep is not restful. She must be dreaming, and they are not pleasant dreams. She mumbles words of distress that I cannot understand, she cries a little and I am torn, because I would like to touch her, console her, and I am afraid of doing it. But then she breathes "Edward," and she smiles, her sleep becoming peaceful. Now I would cry, if I could, because I can't be what she hopes for, what she thinks I am, her fiancé restored to her.

When I hear the priest moving around, I go and find him in the kitchen. He shows me what there is for breakfast and insists that I drink some of the so-called coffee. This time I have to accept, fake sip it, and pour it into the sink the moment he leaves the room for a while. He is concerned about my health, seen I am so pale.

"Anemia," I explain, "but I am strong as a horse. I am fine, really."

Later, Bella awakens and comes into the kitchen. Don Pietro is celebrating the morning Mass in the church. The window looks North, but the room is perfectly lighted now. And so it comes.

"Edward, what happened to your eyes?" she asks, appalled. Before I can decide what to tell her, we hear the priest coming back.

"Not now, not here," I whisper quickly, "I'll explain, don't be afraid." I know I have just postponed the problem. Christ, what shall I say, what story can I invent?

Chapter endnotes

What explanation can he give her? Should he invent something or not? Please tell me what you think.

Just to be clear, Bella is not Edward's singer in this story. They have enough problems as things are.


	20. Chapter 20 The truth

**The Parachutist, by Camilla**

A/N Well, The Parachutist did not make it to the Indie finalists. But I got a lot more readers and more reviews, so I am happy. Thanks a lot to all of you who voted for it. There are many very good stories there, by the way, so I suggest that you read at least the following, if you have not already done so: An American Vampire in Chicago, by just4ALE, Dark games & twisted minds by katinki10, An abridged account, by Alchemilla Mollis, Walter Cannon's Theory, expanded, by temptationsgirl29. Happy reading!

Chapter 20 The truth

Don Pietro comes in with very important news. There might be a safe house for us.

"A good woman I know is, was, the caretaker of a villa up on the hills" he tells us.

"Her employer was Sergio Dal Camin, a big shot of the Fascist Party here in Verona. He and his wife have wholeheartedly supported the Social Republic and, as far as I know, they gave more than a hand, not directly, mind, to round up antifascists and Jews. A week ago they left, saying they were going to Salò.

The housekeeper, however, knew better. She was positive, due to some conversations she overheard, that the couple was repairing to Switzerland, where they had money salted away, just in case. They saved their gasoline coupons for some time, and with a full tank they must have made it. Obviously, the Dal Camins have seen the writing on the wall, they know that the end is coming any time now and they would be a prime target for retaliation, once the antifascists take control of Verona, so they ran away.

The housekeeper feared that, once that day came, if she was found in the villa she could be made to pay for their crimes. Which would be a shame, as she reported to me when she heard her employers plotting something ugly. Because of this, some lives have been saved. In any case, after the mass she entrusted the keys of the villa to me and fled."

"I believe," the priest continues, "that if you go to live there you'll be safe for a while, because nobody in his right mind would go and disturb important persons like those, nor the people working for them. German power protects the house. With you living there, it will look inhabited, the housekeeper still there, which is just fine. Obviously, the moment the Germans leave Verona, you'll have to leave as well. Listen to the radio, now we get broadcasts from liberated Italy too, and when you think the situation is changing, you move. In case, come to me again."

We accept the keys. After giving us directions to the villa, Don Petro leaves for the church, saying he has to listen to confessions, and then maybe he has to go away for a while. He tells us to prepare ourselves lunch with whatever he has in is kitchen and, if he does not return, wait for dark and the raid alarm and then leave.

"When you are there," he concludes, "you can make free use of the house and take whatever you need. If and when the Dal Camins come back, I think it will be barely standing. Feelings run high against them."

When we are alone, Bella is silent for a long time. She is not only puzzled by my behavior, she is deeply hurt. I have saved her, I am taking care of her, but I am doing nothing a lover would be doing now. When she comes too near, I step back. Today I have not touched her at all, and when, just once, she puts a hand on my arm she sees me wincing. I am in control, but also in agony, because it is now clear that we have to stay together for quite a long time, and I don't know how I'll manage it. Her sad expression is killing me. I know I love her desperately, nothing has changed, nothing will ever change, but she is not for me anymore. I have lost her forever the moment Damon's teeth pierced my throat.

But, what I can't bear is that she does not know the truth. It is the only thing that might help her to understand and accept. So I will tell her. Forget about the vague lies I had thought to ply her with. I owe her the truth. Only that will do, even if the idea of her revulsion makes me cringe. Will I put her in danger by doing so? I don't think so. She is good at keeping secrets and the Volturi don't know that I exist.

I want to wait some more, though. We will have to be alone, with no interruptions. We are sitting at the kitchen table, so I do what I am dying to do and shouldn't, and take her hand. She lets her breath out and relaxes a little.

"Bella, I say, "I know I have explanations to give. But let's wait until we will not be disturbed. It is... complicated. I will tell you everything when we are in the safe house." She nods. I withdraw my hand and we sit a long time in silence. I remember I have to move a little, if I don't want to look like a statue and spook her. The silence between us is deafening... it rumbles in my ears…

At noon I talk her into boiling some rice and eating it. She has lost a lot of weight. When Bella is about to fill two dishes, I have to stop her.

"No, nothing for me, I say. I cannot .. don't want .. to eat …. I'm sorry, this is part of what I have to tell you. Later, I promise."

I ask her to tell me what happened when the_ Repubblichini_ arrived at the farm. She says that the twelve years-old son of Santina, and Piera with her baby, were able to slip away but she doesn't know if they were apprehended later or managed to escape and, hopefully, they are now with the Morelli brothers in the mountains. She knows that their father was hanged. She heard Lidia scream his name. When the rest of the women and children were carried away, she was separated from them and delivered to the SS, while the others were taken somewhere else and she does not know their fate. She cries a little, remembering the horror.

_And now, I have to add to the horror._

When the evening comes, I ask her to finish the second portion of rice, the one I haven't eaten. She does it with enormous effort, and looks at me all the time, a thousand questions in her eyes.

I never desired an air raid alarm more than this night. When we finally hear the unnerving sound it is time to go. Again I take her in my arms, ask her to close her eyes and run in the deserted streets.

The villa is on the hills, in an area called Vallena. It is quite isolated and surrounded by an ivy covered wall. Perfect.

There is plenty of luxury and bad taste. The bedrooms, no less than four of them, are on the second floor. On the first floor there is an overstuffed living room, a formal dining room, a study and a very big kitchen, with a cool pantry, down a few steps. A side door leads to a tiny apartment that was obviously the caretaker's. The kitchen is so well stocked that makes one forget there is a war on. Tea, coffee even, sugar, condensed milk, pasta, rice, corn flour, tins of everything from tomatoes to tuna fish, meat, peas, beans and so on. Many of the labels indicate they have been bought in Switzerland, where the Dal Camins must have been frequent visitors. In the cool pantry there are cheeses and butter. Bella is looking with amazement on her face. I am relieved that she will be able to eat well with no need to go outside. Shopping would be impossible, too dangerous, and we have no ration cards anyway. Obviously, rationing was not a problem for the house owners.

I propose that she takes a bath in the palatial bathroom on the second floor. I look around and find in a closet a soft bathrobe that seems new and I convince her to take it. What she is wearing should be washed thoroughly, or even thrown away, if she can find replacements. Later, she chooses the bedroom that looks less used and I help her to make up the queen sized bed. Awkwardness reaches new highs when she realizes that I am not going to share the bed with her. I would like the earth to open and engulf me. Instead, I tell her that I am not sleepy, that I want to keep watch, that she is still tired and she must go to sleep now. We will speak tomorrow. Angry and bewildered, she slams the door behind her. She cries, muffling the sounds on her cushion. And there is nothing, nothing I can do. This is hell.

The night feels eternal. I take a shower in the housekeeper's bathroom and continue waiting, while I prepare myself to tell her the truth.

Afterward, if she is too repelled, I'll stay outside the house, just guarding it.

When she awakens, the early morning sun is shining outside, illuminating the walled garden. Good. I'll make use of it.

Since making coffee with a _napoletana_ is far beyond my knowledge, I have a cup of tea ready for her, with some biscuits, and I insist that she eats and drinks. When she has finished, we go into the living room.

"Please sit," I say. "This is not going to be easy. You have asked what happened to me," I continue, "you have felt how cold my skin is, and how pale. My eyes are not green anymore, but this strange amber color, I am exceptionally strong, I can run like the wind, and my body is hard as a rock. In fact, I broke open the wagon doors with my naked feet. You have seen how different I am, you have felt it under your fingers.

So, it is true, something happened to me. Something that is pretty unbelievable, but I ask you to believe it. The truth is that I died and was resurrected in this form. I am not human anymore, Bella."

I am trying to keep my tone even, detached, but on the last words my voice cracks.

Her liquid brown eyes are large as saucers, she is bewildered by what I am telling her. She doesn't speak, though, but I can hear her heart racing. Hell, what would I give to know what she is thinking. OK, time for the worst.

"I'll show you how inhuman I am," I continue, opening the glass door leading to the garden. I step outside, unbutton my shirt and take it off. And she looks open mouthed as I sparkle.

A moment after, Bella is in the garden, her arms around me.

"Edward, you are so beautiful, "she says, lightly running a finger on my chest and leaving a trail of fire in its wake. "Are you an angel now?"

I step back, confused. Beautiful? An angel? Putting my shirt on again I retreat inside, where she follows me.

"Hardly an angel," I sneer, "I am a demon. That is what I have been turned into. The exact name for what I am is vampire, or bloodsucker, or leech, that is what I am. And that is what I do. I drink blood, Bella."

She has gone very pale. Obviously, in the last two days she has seen me doing strange enough things to believe me. She gulps and opens her mouth, then closes it again. I see that she wants to say something but, she cannot decide what and she is sifting among questions. Smart girl, when she finally speaks, she asks the most relevant one.

"Are you going to drink my blood, Edward?"

"I have stopped killing humans for their blood some months ago," I say dryly. "Now I sustain myself with animals. So no, if I can help it. You must not fear me. If the temptation becomes too much to bear, I'll go outside. Or I can stay outside all the time, if you prefer it."

"Please don't go," she pleads, "I…I want to understand. Is this the reason why you did not come back to me? That you are being so… aloof?"

"Yes, how could I come back and be with you? I am more dangerous than a ravenous tiger. I have killed, and killed again…" I want her to believe that I really couldn't, despite my promise. She must understand and forgive me.

"Edward," she says, "do you have any idea of how many men will be going back to their wives after the war and confess the horrible things they had to do? They will have to, if they want to find peace. Many of them will be also physically changed, hideously sometimes…"

I am speechless. How can this compare?

"If their wives really love them, it will not make a difference, eventually." she concludes.

And then she is again embracing me. I should step back, distance myself, run, but I can't, because she is kissing me now. I know I can't open my mouth, let her near my teeth, but she is not deterred. My lips are hard, but she finds a way with them, then she kisses my jaw, my neck… . Beyond reason, I am kissing her back..so warm, so soft, her smell so delicious … my lips open slightly, and her tongue is sliding inside. When it touches my upper teeth, I am lost. There is not cutting, but the pressure, the feeling, is enough to damn me.

The monster has awakened.

Thirst hits me like a torpedo, in my throat there is a river of lava, my mouth is full of venom. I know that I am going to bite her, her blood calls to me, nothing matters anymore but this, the enticing pulse that is drumming in my ears, drawing me to her throat. She will die, and I will follow her, I'll find a way, but I cannot stop myself now…. I'll take what is mine …

--------

Chapter endnotes

So, cliffhanger. Do you think he will bite her? Will he kill or just change her? And, if he doesn't bite her, why? What will stop him? That is an interesting thing to speculate about.

I crave your reviews more than Edward craves blood. (And a thousand thanks to those who reviewed).

The Fascist Social Republic had its headquarters in Salò, on the Garda Lake.

Before there were refrigerators we had ice boxes - I am old enough to remember them - and bought ice to put into them, but ice was not available everywhere, so in well to do houses there was a room, _la dispensa,_ that was marginally cooler, like a cellar, but not exactly.

Before the mocha machine we had the _napoletana_, that you had to turn upside down at a certain point, and be quick about it, or you got scalded.


	21. Chapter 21 The ring

**The Parachutist, by Camilla10**

Chapter 21 The ring

She does not struggle, just whimpers when I interrupt the kiss and lower my mouth to her neck. But, suddenly my right hand, which is fisted in her hair and is drawing her head backward to give me better access, starts throbbing. A circle of fire is making my finger ache, it is like something is cutting through it, tendrils of fierce pain, a sensation I had forgotten about, are springing forth. It is a cage of flames now encasing my arm, my chest, my head. It hurts so much that the blood frenzy I was succumbing to abates.

So does the pain. I look at my hand and at the golden ring on my pale finger.

Egon has stopped me, Egon has saved us.

I push her back, almost roughly. I am disgusted at myself, at my loss of control and this in turn makes me very angry.

"A moment ago I was about to kill you," I hiss, "so now you see why I could not come back? As soon I can put you in a real safe place I will go. We cannot be what we were, we cannot, do you understand?"

"But you did not harm me," she retorts," and, even if you had, it would not have mattered."

"What the hell are you saying, are you crazy?" I am yelling now.

But she yells louder than me.

"I was on that train, Edward, I was going to die anyway in a few days, hours maybe, have you forgotten? You saved me and now my life is yours to dispose of. I prefer a thousand times to die in your arms than to be killed by the SS. I thought I had lost you, that I was not going to see you again, even if you were still alive. I will not go through it another time. If you reject me, I'll … I'll give myself up, because I have nothing left to live for but you."

Christ, she is so beautiful in her wrath. When, after the outburst, her eyes fill with tears, I crumble. And now it is me embracing her, carefully, tenderly.

"I am not rejecting you," I murmur on her hair, "it is you that should reject the disgusting thing I have become."

"Whatever you are, do you still love me?" She asks.

"I..I don't have … the .. .the right to …" I am reduced to stammering.

"So you do love me." It is not a question.

In my arms she is so frail, but she is fiercer than me, her resolve much stronger. She cups my wintry face in her warm soft hands.

"I love you so much that I wish to give you anything you desire, to be whatever you want me to be. You were my angel, and are my angel still. If you really need my blood, then take it, be my angel of death. I am not afraid. On the train I made my peace with death. I only hoped it was quick. Can you make it quick?"

I know that she is not joking. But her words are almost meaningless, now. A thought has invaded my brain, getting stronger and stronger.

_You, stupid freak, what were you thinking? If you want blood there is plenty outside. But there is only one Bella in the universe.'_

My bloodlust has gone, completely. However, with her in my arms, something else is stirring. For more than a year my alien, stone body has desired only to satisfy its thirst. Now it desires a woman, this woman who, again, is kissing me, her fingers weaving through my hair, while her other hand is under my shirt, caressing me, drawing me tighter to her chest. In her passion, the bathrobe she is wearing is coming undone and I can see her breasts, still luscious despite her thinness. Then I can see all of her and I lose it.

In seconds I am naked too and we are entangled on the carpet. I rediscover her body, as she does mine. But there is no foreplay, because I want her and I know, now I can even _smell_, that she wants me. As gently as I can manage, I pry her legs open and with one swift thrust I am sheathed inside. Her breath catches and she moans. In pleasure, clearly, not in pain. How is it possible that she is not revolted by my cold member? She feels incredibly hot. But, before I move again I realize that I don't know how to handle this. If I let go and start pumping, like I am dying to do, can I check my strength so that I don't hurt her inside, fatally maybe? And what about the venom in my release? I am terrified now and fear makes me go limp. I fall on the carpet near her, murmuring brokenly:

"I am sorry, I can't do this, I am afraid of hurting you, I am sorry, I am sorry…"

Of course, now that I am no more inside her body, I am getting hard again, painfully, uselessly. So here I lie, cold as a corpse, but an aroused corpse all the same. I know I should rise, cover myself, leave the room, but the warmth of her silky flank touching mine glues me to her warm skin. Eventually is Bella who moves. Before I can mourn her loss, I feel her kneeling near my thigh.

"So beautiful" she murmurs. Then her hot hands are on my chest, caressing me, moving downward, on my stomach, past my navel… a hiss escapes my lips because I know what her hands want to do.

"Please, Edward, please," she says softly, "let me…."

With shame and delight, I let her.

It does not take long, and when I come I roar like the feral creature I am. Even my orgasm seems to be more powerful then when I was human. While my tremors abate and my unneeded breath is returning to normal, I wait for her reaction. I don't expect it to be good, now she has heard the animalistic sounds I am capable of making, another proof of my inhumanity. But no, totally unfazed she rises, goes in the kitchen and comes back with a towel, so that I can clean up. Then she takes my hand.

"Now we need to speak seriously, Edward," she says calmly, "but not here. This room is too ugly. Please, come to bed with me."

She puts on her bathrobe again and I put on my underwear, the only thing clear to me is that this is not about sex, now. So I follow her upstairs like an obedient child, happy that she is in charge, because I am so confused that I can't even try to imagine what is going to happen.

It happens that we lay side by side, looking at each other, and she grills me thoroughly. I tell her everything, from the moment the damn truck broke and I took refuge in that church. I don't spare her the knowledge of what it meant to be a new born vampire, the irresistible urge to kill and feed. I tell her how I destroyed Damon and Guido and the satisfaction I got from it until, down from my high, the reality of my condition had impacted me fully. I tell her how I had tried to kill myself then, and how, discovering that cyanide was useless, I had planned to do a massacre near Volterra in full sunlight, so that the Volturi would take me down.

Telling her is not easy. I find myself reliving the horror of those first days and I can't go on. She takes my hand and brings it to her cheek. When I am again in command of my voice, I feel the need to dispel any illusion she might have.

"My condition has not changed in the meanwhile, albeit I have a better control on myself. Well, most of the time, that is. I belong to a different species now, do you understand what it means?"

"Oh yes, I do," she says bitterly," I belong to a different _**race**_, don't I? This is what they tell me. An inferior race, to be exterminated by the beautiful, blond, pure Aryans. Please, don't give me crap about different races, species, whatever."

Again, I am speechless, while she continues.

"So, I am not going to let you go, unless you really want to. I don't know how we will manage, you have to tell me much more, I need to understand more but, if we love each other we will find a way to stay together, despite everything."

Hell, I can't even make love to her properly, does she not understand it? I cannot see any future for us. But I will not tell her this, I love her too much, this is the only thing I can agree with. And she…who is strong, fearless, honed by suffering until she has become like a fiery blade, she loves me too, despite what I am.

So I will go along, until Bella realizes how things are, until she accepts that I have nothing to offer her but pain and denial, that forever means two very different things for me and for her.

But, for the moment, I am hers. Then, come what may.

And yet, and yet…against reason I feel a glimmer of hope, so faint that I cannot count on it. But it refuses to go away.

Chapter endnote

Well, Egon's ring…either you believe in miracles, or you believe in psychoanalysis. Edward had decided, deep down, that he would not drink human blood anymore. To make himself stay with his decision, despite a temptation triggered by passion and almost impossible to deny, he has his body feeling excruciating pain, emanating from the ring, which embodies his promise, to Egon, but mainly to himself. It is nothing supernatural, it is a mental pain he inflicts on himself subconsciously, because he promised himself that he would not drink from humans anymore. Consciously he is betraying his promise, but his subconscious compels him to stop, making him imagine that he is feeling pain. And he feels it. The moment he decides not to bite, the pain stops

In the next chapters we will see how they progress. Will he be able to overcome the physical disgust he has for his body, and the feeling of being too dangerous to have normal sex with her?

Please, tell me what you think.


	22. Chapter 22 Together

**The Parachutist, by Camilla10**

Chapter 22 Together

Bella is cooking. She does it sadly, because she knows I'll never eat again, and she would have loved to cook for me. She is quite a good cook, she says. The Finzi used to have a housekeeper, but she had to leave when the racial laws forbade Jews to have Christian servants. Before that, however, Bella had spent long hours in the kitchen with her beloved Lucia, watching her work, and had learned a lot.

Renata Levi Finzi was so wrapped up in her translations that she completely forgot about mealtimes, so Bella took over.

"Mom was a great translator," she tells me in justification, "so publishers still gave her work to do, signing with a pen name, and of course she translated political articles from forbidden foreign newspapers for my father's friends. She knew four languages… I wanted to study languages at the University, and be a translator too…"

She puts her stewed _cannellini _beans on a platter, adds pepper and starts eating them with a spoon. I inhale the aroma and it is pleasant, more so than other foods. I can discern the ingredients she used, the celery, the onion, a little tomato paste, but I know that I can't eat them. They would taste like dirt and then I would have to vomit everything. In my frustration, being denied something I used to enjoy, I tried to eat human food in the past and it was always the same. Horrible. When I was staying in the partisans' camp I had to gulp down minute quantities of food, as it would have been suspicious and extremely rude not to accept. But, it was deeply unpleasant; the ingested scraps feeling like wet sawdust, heavy in my stomach until I got rid of them. Poor guys, they were half hungry all the time, but they shared what they had. Once I brought them part of a deer I had killed, with a complicated story to explain how I came by it. I made everybody very happy, but it was not something I could do more than once.

This reminds me that I had better hunt tonight, making sure that, despite Egon's ring, I am not overwhelmed by thirst. I think I could go to Mount Baldo on the Garda lake and find some game there. If I run very fast it should not take me more than an hour to reach it. I hate to leave Bella alone but, I will have to. She is very understanding and encourages me. "Please go," she says, "I'll be safe."

Since I have to wait for dark anyway, there are some hours to spend. Bella washes her clothes, while I change my own, taking a pair of trousers I have in my backpack and a spare shirt. She asks for my discarded garments to wash them too and then offers to mend them, once they are dry. The pants were ripped by barbed wire when I had my little party with the Dobermans. This domestic normalcy floors me. Here we are, playing house: a vampire and the human girl he snatched from hell. He, trying to kill her himself afterwards and then allowing her to fill his dead body with bliss. It is so weird.

But there is something more, I suddenly realize: **I was able to snatch Bella from hell just because I was a vampire. **Had I remained human, I would never had the possibility to get back to the farm in time. I would be still with the Army, if I was alive and, even if I did get back in time, I would never had the means to save her. She would have died in an extermination camp. For the first time since I was turned I feel that what had happened to me had been preordained by fate so that she could live. It is a mind blowing concept, I do not know exactly what to do with it but, for the first time, I do not feel so resentful about my transformation. I know that if somebody had asked me, when I had to leave Bella, if I was prepared to give my life for her to be safe, I would have consented with no hesitation.

I look at her while she washes our things and then goes into the backyard and hangs them to dry. She had a white silk shirt on when she was taken. She notices me looking while she spreads it lovingly, lest it creases to much: "This was done with the silk of your parachute," she tells me. "Piera helped me to cut it properly, she is a good seamstress, and then I sewed it. It was meant to be worn on feast days, but I wore it as often as I could. It was like having a piece of you around me." Her smile is so sweet that my dead heart melts.

"I liked to work with Piera, she was the only one with whom I could speak of you," Bella continues. "Poor Papà Morelli. He felt he had let my parents down, allowing me to... to be with you," she reddens, "even though he did not know it at the time. He thought he should have prevented it. So, it was embarrassing. Then when Marco and Bepi came back and said you had disappeared, they all thought that you had died, and that I had better forget you. But Piera encouraged me: I wanted to believe you were still alive, maybe taken prisoner, and she said it was possible. You know, the second night after you had left, I felt awful, so I went to bed before supper and had a nightmare. I saw you falling from the sky, with no parachute, and there were rocks where you were going to fall. When you hit the rocks with a horrible thud there was a lot of blood. I screamed and screamed and mercifully woke up. Then, three days after that, I dreamed again. You were still lying on the rocks but, after a while, you rose again and started walking away. I called, but you did not turn. It was awful, but at the same time I thought that whatever had happened to you, you were not really dead… You could not have been; I told myself, I would have felt it."

"_No, not really dead,"_ I think sadly, _"if you can call this life."_ But the fact that she had dreamt of my death and resurrection while it was actually happening is amazing. I feel that our connection is deep, that we do belong together, despite what has happened. This morning, because I don't want any secrets between us, I told her about my mind reading talent. She was a little upset, until I added that with her my power doesn't function. It frustrates me, but at the same time it is a sort of blessing. I enjoy the silence and it makes me feel normal with her, at least from this point of view.

God, how can we make this work? Since this morning we have not touched, I am still very much afraid of myself, and I don't think it right if I accept to be pleasured and then I can't reciprocate.

…..***…..

I look at the Garda lake under the moon, some four thousand feet below. Waves of rock, like a petrified sea, incline over the distant waters. This Mount Baldo is a beautiful place. While climbing, I have taken care of two roe deer and one chamois. Now, going back to bury them, I decide to cut a piece for Bella to cook. I am no butcher, well in a manner of speaking I am but, in any case I take my old army knife and do my carving best. It has always irked me after hunting, so much good meat going to waste in a starving country. Well, not this time, I don't need to keep my hunting a secret from Bella. And, how strange, it is almost like Kosher meat, completely drained of blood. I wrap it in leaves and run back home.

When I enter the villa I hear Bella crying and I fly on the stairs, scared. But no, she is sleeping. She must be having a nightmare. I kneel near the bed, my arms around her. "Love, don't cry, I am here. I am here." It is so natural, to caress, to kiss away her tears, to draw her to my chest… She stops crying, but she is not completely awake.

"Edward, don't leave me", she murmurs, and then grows agitated again, grasping my shirt. "Shh, love, I am here, I'll stay with you… sleep Bella, sleep…"

Eventually I lay with her on the bed. It is better that there is no direct contact between my body and hers, because I am so cold, so I envelop her in a blanket and gather her in my arms. She sighs contentedly and her breathing evens, Sleeping entwined and waking up in the morning to the sight of her beautiful face… how I had dreamed to be able to do this in the farm, when we had only one short hour to love each other. Now I have all night but, I can't sleep anymore. Fate is a cruel bitch. I inhale Bella's wonderful scent and I find that I don't crave her blood, and this not only because I have just hunted. I have other cravings, though, that I must and will keep under control. I feel my body hardening. No. She needs her rest, my needs should wait, until I am sure of what I can and cannot do.

She is awakening. She stirs, encounters my hard body, freezes, then opens her eyes and an expression of pure happiness lights her face, when she realizes she has slept in my arms.

Chapter endnotes

Well, a fluffy chapter, as far as the story, and my writing style, allow for. But I wanted our two lovers finally rediscover tenderness, after their terrible experiences. Indeed they belong together, even if the road is difficult and full of bumps still. Reviews would make me very happy.

A chamois is a sort of mountain goat, present in the Alps, the Appennini, the Pyrenees and other places in Europe. If you want to see one, just google the name on Google images.

Yes, Italians got quite hungry during the war, Bologna being an area where food scarcity was less severe, but still. I don't mean the partisans, of course they had little food. I mean normal people in towns like Rome, even well to do ones. There simply was not food to buy. One of my aunts told me that for her 18th birthday she got a small platter of potato chips and she ate them crying and not sharing, because she was 18 and those pitiful chips were the only party she was getting….. In modern films about wartime, my older relatives tell me that it is all wrong, because both actors and extras look so well fed and healthy. If they are slim, it is due to diet and exercise, not to malnutrition.

And, finally, a suggestion. Do you know the work of Just4ALE and her series about the American vampire in Chicago? It is an Edward and Bella saga, but she has invented a slightly different brand of vampires, with exciting and sexy characteristics.


	23. Chapter 23 Lovers, again

**The Parachutist, by Camilla10**

A/N Uh, yes, here be lemons. But not only that.

Chapter 23 Lovers, again

"Just don't move," she tells me, and rushes to the bathroom. I do my still-as-a-statue act, not breathing, even, Waiting for her, elated, terrified. She comes back and I notice her long sleeved cotton nightgown, that would make a nun proud. She has probably chosen it because it is unlikely that Signora Dal Camin has used it much. If she was covered by see-through lace, she would not be more enticing. Then Bella surprises me by not coming straight to bed but going to the window, where she opens blinds and shutters. Today is again a perfect spring day and the morning sunlight pours over me.

"Please Edward. I want to see you again under the sun." she says. "Take off your shirt." _So, she is giving me orders now…_ a powerful wave of desire washes over my stone body. I comply, freeing myself of my shirt, then I lie down, forcing myself to be still again.

Now she is exploring.

"You are (kiss) the most gorgeous (kiss) thing I have ever seen (lick, oh Christ)."

I can't believe she is attracted to my inhuman body, but it appears to be so. After a while she finds the crescent shaped scar on my throat and traces it with her finger.

"So it is here where…" she whispers, kissing it, laving it with her tongue. I discover it is an extremely sensitive place and the sensation goes straight to my groin. Before I know it, I have moved and her nightgown is off her. After a night of hard control on myself I am practically bursting. Calm down, you animal, she is fragile… but, how can I not kiss her back? How can I keep my tongue in my mouth, my fingers from wandering, from her back to her slim waist, to her breasts, to her stomach, to …. I know that I have a good control over my hands, so maybe I can just … just ….

I find that I can. I ask her not to move, lest my control shatters. Cautiously, lovingly, I seek her pleasure. I remember what she liked, I never allowed myself to forget, so now I am doing this, and this also, my fingers inside her, finding her sweet spots, until she moans, then cries '_oh sì_,' then exhales and tightens inside, while her mouth forms that perfect O that tells me I have done my job well.

Of course I am hard as a rock now, and my pants can't keep it concealed from her. Bella blushes, then grins and says:

"Let me see if you sparkle everywhere…" God, how I do love her, accepting me, forgiving me, liking me, desiring me, despite what I have become. So, unashamedly, I show her and, once she has seen it, she directs her hands to give me joy and release.

I feel that now my body is again hers and, for as long as she is happy with it, I can be happy with it too. I hated it so much, but now her appreciation is changing everything.

Later, I convince her to have some breakfast and after that I show her the piece of deer I brought home. The cook in Bella says that it should be hung for a day or two, as all venison should, but then she decides that she wants it, and wants it soon, so she will cook it longer, as fresh meat is hard to chew. She must have missed meat for a long time, because she starts preparing Polenta e Cervo with shining eyes.

It takes quite a while for the stew to cook and when she finally eats, it is midway between lunch and supper. In the meanwhile she has ironed her laundry and mended my pants, while I hunted for something to read within the debatable and modest collection of books in the bookshelves, intermingled with ugly porcelain figurines. Ugh, Mussolini's opera omnia, Mein Kampf translated into Italian, Nietzsche, ditto, Julus Evola's books, Guido da Verona, Pitigrilli. Ugh indeed. Then, assembled by color, as decorative elements maybe, there are some classics, thank God. Orlando Furioso, the epic poem by Ariosto, that is almost like a fairy tale. I could read it, I always wanted to, when I studied the language.

From the kitchen we move again to the living room, that Bella finds offensive to her Italian upper class good taste, but where she can sit comfortably on the sofa and I can put my head on her lap. In any case the bedroom we are using is not much better, as taste goes. The bed is unfortunately built in a fake Venetian Rococo style, with matching pea green nightstands and vanity table. She shuddered the first time she saw the room. No matter. I feel so peaceful while she plays with my hair. I can't go to sleep, but my inner demons, the Furies that have been persecuting me since I was changed, must have done it.

"So soft…" she murmurs, running her fingers through my locks, then massaging my scalp. My body reacts, but in a different way.

"Edward, you are purring," my love says, amazed, then feels my throat and confirms it. "Yes you are, this is so nice."

It never happened to me before, but then again the inhuman sounds I am capable of emitting were never due to happiness and contentment before. I should be ashamed, but I am not. This woman, my woman, likes me even when I do something that no living man would ever do. How did I get so lucky, why did fate relent?

…***…

Things escalate naturally. It seems just right that we take our bath together, seen that the tub in the main bathroom is very big. After all, there are frequent electricity failures, so, once there is plenty of hot water, it is better to make the most of it, because another time we might not have the opportunity. I love bathing in hot water; my body warms up, and now I feel that it is more pleasant to her.

So, this night I am sitting on the tub rim and I am washing her hair, after she has deliciously washed mine. As there is no shower, we brought an enamel carafe for rinsing, filling it from the faucet. I have finished shampooing her and now Bella is on her knees, preparing to rise. Seeking better leverage she turns toward me and her face … her face is a few inches from the undeniable proof of my desire.

Her expression changes, and she looks, well, she looks _hungry_, then she breathes like she would before diving, and her mouth is on me.

Hot, wet, her hand where her mouth cannot reach, her tongue… fuck, this is incredible, this is making me die, can one die of pleasure … can a vampire die of pleasure? My entire body is pulsing with it, the urge to thrust is overwhelming but, somehow, I can control it, and I move only minutely, gently, remembering how fragile, how delicate she is, with respect to my strength. The tiny amount of sanity I still retain tells me I have to warn her that this cannot end where it normally would.

"Bella," I say, my voice rough and unsteady," the venom, there is danger, when I say stop, please move."

"Just say when," she whispers, raising her beautiful flushed face. And then she is on me again. A few more minutes of indescribable bliss and I have to say "move", because I am reaching the point of no return. She withdraws her mouth and, with a couple hand strokes, I let myself go, groaning and shuddering. When I have regained my breath we both rinse, then I scoop her out of the water and I wrap her in a big bath towel while she grabs another and makes a turban for her wet hair.

We are on the bed now, and I am worshipping her, there is not an inch of her skin that I don't want to kiss. In between kisses, I thank her for the gift she has given me. We never did it before, when I was human. I had thought about it, of course, what male doesn't, but, it had to come from her, I would never have asked. I can't keep my wonder to myself, so I ask a risky question.

"Love," I say," this has been beyond words, but how did you… ?" I have not the courage to add 'do it so well?'. Hell, maybe now I am offending her. She blushes and answers.

"Piera …."

So it is true, girls will speak of everything.

Remembering Piera sets her on another course.

"When the Militia came, she ran away with her baby from a back window. I don't know if she really managed to escape and find her husband on the mountains."

I tell her that Don Luigi thought she had made it, along with her nephew.

I am so happy, she really became my friend," Bella adds, and continues.

"When I was taken, I wondered if I, and the Morellis, had been betrayed, and by whom. I have a suspicion."

"Tell me," I encourage her.

"Piera said that she had a suitor, a fiancé almost, at least in his mind, before she met the youngest of the Morelli brothers, Mino. She fell head over heels in love and married him hastily, because they had a baby already on the way. Of course the scorned suitor, Lorenzo, did not take it well. Later on, Mino joined his brothers, already in the Resistance, and went in the mountains to avoid deportation to work camps in Germany. Lorenzo, on the contrary, was secure in his protected job in a bakery.

Knowing that she was all alone, he tried to see her again. When she sent him packing, he stalked her. So, if she had to go to the village, she asked me to accompany her. She did not want to tell the family. Eventually she was so pissed off with him that she threatened him, making it explicit that she was still in contact with her husband and with the partisans. It is possible that he, having seen me, wondered if I was really Morelli's niece. It would have been relatively easy to discover that my supposed father did not have a daughter…. And I was not the only Jew to be concealed by Christian families … it would not be impossible that he put two and two together.

"So I don't know," she concludes, "but he might have avenged himself in this way."

I am overwhelmed by fury.

"I'll find him," I growl, and then I realize that she is looking at me with panic in her eyes. She has never seen the face of an angry vampire before. I know it is not pretty. I know I am scary, my eyes black as night.

"No, Edward, no," she pleads, "you must not think of it. I suspect, but I don't know. Please love, please, I don't want to think about it anymore. I want to forget the war…."

Chapter endnotes

Oh please, send me a review.

That the bite mark is an erogenous area for a vampire is not something I thought by myself. I read it in some other story and found it completely convincing. If somebody remembers the author, I'll be happy to credit it to her/him.

Cervo is deer, obviously, and I think you know what polenta is.

I hint to some taste snobbery in Bella. It is an Italian reality, where good taste and culture mark the difference between people with a tradition and _noveau riches_. It is not a matter of money, it is handed down from generation to generation. Some Italian Jewish families were, are, really high class.

The book collection of the Dal Camins is fairly typical and very Fascist, apart from the 'ornamental' classics, and you don't want to go there. If you are curious, you can always google the authors I name.

For a long time the chronicles of the Resistance and the Italian civil war between 1943 and 1945, avoided mentioning many cases like the one above, private revenges and even murders, covered up as political acts, while in truth motivated by personal reasons, like envy or jealousy. But they happened, both sides. It is a controversial aspect that historians are addressing only now, after more than 50 years.


	24. Chapter 24 Our bubble

**The Parachutist, by Camilla10**

Chapter 24 Our bubble ….

And I help her to forget. I can't deny her this, after all that she had to suffer. But, in fact, we are forgetting together. After some time we are more concerned with our bodies than with Piera and her stalker. Because we are learning that there are levels of intimacy we can reach even if we can't do everything … yet, and it is such an epiphany that it sends any and all other thoughts in oblivion.

Can I use my mouth and my tongue the way she has used hers? I desperately want to, and I find that I can. Her taste is musky and sweet, an intoxicating elixir that makes me feel slightly drunk. It is the essence of my love, the essence of Bella. Thirst is a distant ache in my throat; there is not a moment I am tempted to bite while I am pleasuring her. Knowing I can make her feel this ecstasy is glorious, because I am triumphing over the monster I thought I had become.

She came quite vocally, but is very quiet now, lost in her after glow. I am proud, elated and hungry for more. Fear is still present, however. I know now that I can control my thirst and my strength, but I cannot control the effects of my venom. I don't know enough about it, and, in my despair, I never thought to ask Carlisle for more information, so sure I was that I would never make love again.

Now she is looking at me.

"I could drown in your eyes," she says and suddenly she rises from the bed. The turban she had on is long gone and her hair is a tangled mass, beautiful to behold, even if she would not think so. But, I don't know what she wants to do.

"I have something to show you," she tells me, a mischievous smile illuminating her face, "while you hunted I gathered, isn't it what women do? I could not sleep, so I explored the house, and look what I found."

She takes a shoe box from the dresser's top and gives it to me. I take it from her, open the lid and gape. Did she read my mind?

"I found it concealed in the hunting rifles closet." She continues, "Signor Dal Camin must have had things going on the side that he obviously did not want his wife to know about. Imagine my surprise when I found this … cache."

The shoe box is packed full of condoms, Swiss produced.

No words are necessary. We will try. I want to prolong the anticipation, though, I want to savor it fully. So the first thing I do is take a silver brush from the vanity table. God bless the housekeeper that kept everything clean in this house. The brush looks pristine. I make Bella sit and go to work on her hair, basking in her floral scent. When I am done, I admire my handwork, the mass of mahogany silk like a mantle on the ivory skin of her back.

I make her turn, we are both standing now, her breasts pressed on my hard chest.

"I am so cold..." I lament.

"I am warm enough for two," she whispers in my ear, and then we are kissing, her lips opening for me, my tongue exploring, caressing, cherishing her mouth.

We fall together on the bed, our delight overwhelming, now that we know where we are going.

And finally I am getting there, condom donned, her legs around my lower back, her arms around my neck.

Now I am inside her, we are one. I keep still, however, some fear lingers. "Love, tell me if …" I start saying, but she effectively silences me.

"Shut up and move your beautiful ass," she tells me in Italian, her heels digging into the part of my anatomy she has just named, spurring me, exciting me, liberating me. _Oh yes, I'll move it._ With one hand I grasp the headboard to give me something to hold on to, lest my weight crushes her, with the other arm I encircle her waist, gently supporting her. As we move together, I don't find too taxing the moderate pace I have to keep and control. I am happy that I can love her in this way, that I can be a man to my woman, not an inhuman machine. So ours is a slow dance, at least it seems slow to me, but wonderful none the less, until she says, among enchanting moans:

"I am … I am almost.. I need … just a little … don't be afraid, I am not made of glass." Well, she is to me, but I manage to give her that 'just a little', and it is enough for me too. We come together, and now I don't roar: I scream her name as she screams mine.

Later I discover that, unnoticed, my hand did quite a lot of damage to the headboard. Well, it was ugly anyway ..

….***….

I am again on Mount Baldo, looking at the Garda lake under the full moon. I am not hunting this time, as Bella is with me. I wanted to share with her this special place, this beautiful view. We are sitting on a rock ledge, a vertiginous drop of four thousand feet below us, but she is secure in my arms. To come here I set her on my shoulders, arms around my neck and legs around my waist, while I first ran and then climbed up here. This time she did not close her eyes and she had difficulty to contain her exhilaration.

"Edward, this cannot be true, I can't believe how fast you are. You fly, almost, and it is like magic. It would take hours for a climber to get up here and for you it was a matter of minutes …"

I delight in her joy, as this is one of the few things, maybe the only one, I like of my inhuman nature.

We speak of that, and I am as honest as I can be. She wants to understand all that happened to me, and what I am now, a vampire, and her lover. I tell her about Carlisle, that extraordinary person, with a family like him, immortals who have chosen to be as human as possible, who have chosen not to feed from men…

"He showed me the way," I confess, "but I was weak, so I did not follow it. I felt I was justified in taking the Germans' blood, but the truth is that I did not do it for any justifiable reason, I did it for greed…. Helping the partisans was one thing, it was right, while this was horribly wrong…"

"But, you stopped…" she observes.

"Yes, when I realized I had... drank from one of God's just men, and maybe from others before him. I did not always bother to listen to their minds, I just rendered them unconscious and killed them." Now it is the time to tell her about Egon and to explain why I wear his ring, and will wear it forever, until gold turns to dust.

"This is the badge of my shame," I continue, my mouth on her windblown hair, "I can't forgive myself and I can't believe that I am allowed to be so happy now, with you. It is like a dream…"

And indeed our being together has taken an unreal quality, a time out of time, there is no yesterday or tomorrow, but just us, here, now. Days pass unnoticed, we are well into April, but we even forget to listen to the radio, sometimes, lost in each other, in our confidences, in our lovemaking. With some embarrassment I have discovered that my body has practically no need of recovery, that I can be ready again in minutes, that I could make love all day long. Bella can't, obviously, she is human, so I have to curb my desire, and keep it concealed, as far as I am able to, because she would not deny me anything. Her passion, if not her body, matches mine.

But, even with those limitations, we are almost delirious most of the time, enacting our personal Kama Sutra, incredibly erotic despite the control I still have to exert. Plus, I have discovered that some of my fears have no reason to be, that we can do more than I thought possible. I don't allow myself to forget for a moment how fragile she is, though, and I do not indulge in a perverse fantasy that once, just once, came unbidden: _"How would it feel, what could we do, if she was like me?" _No, this is not something I should be thinking, this is too monstrous to contemplate.

…***…

More days have passed, unnoticed as well. Today we have found a station transmitting classical music, and we lie on the sofa listening. I am lazily feeding her chocolates, the Dal Camins had quite a lot stashed, due to their frequent trips to Switzerland, and Bella is working her way through it .She has not seen chocolate for a very long time, and she cannot get enough. I put one in her mouth, and, before chewing it, she licks the tips of my two fingers.

"Mmm", she says, "you are almost as sweet. You taste so good..." I am a little pissed off, because the chocolates don't melt, due to my icy skin. If they melted, it would be more pleasurable for her. The concert ends and there is an announcement. The CLN has ordered a general insurrection and, at last, the allied forces are descending from the Appennini into the Po Valley.

We look at each other. Soon, very soon, it will be time to go.

Chapter endnotes

For the first time Edward refers to himself as a 'man'. Keeping in mind what he says in Twilight, 'I am not human but I am still a man', I wanted him to acknowledge this not immediately, but after some time. Until this moment he has thought of himself in terms of monster, animal, feral creature. After all, SM's Edward had been a vampire for almost a century, and had a clearer idea of what he was, while this one has been a vampire only for one year or so. Still, if I can criticize a bit the very source of my inspiration, I think that, in that specific circumstance, the sentence in Twilight should have been , "'I am not human but I am still male".

Well, they did the deed. Comments?

_Sta' zitto e muovi quel bel culo_ is what Bella tells Edward in Italian. In my language it sounds rougher than in English, shocking, almost.

The CLN, or Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale was the supreme Resistance authority, representing all the partisan brigades and the democratic parties, whatever their political orientation.


	25. Chapter 25 Our bubble has burst

**The Parachutist, by Camilla10**

Chapter note

On April 19th, 1945, concurrent with the renewal of the Allied offensive, the CLN called out a general insurrection. Bologna was liberated on April 21st by Allied forces (2nd Polish Corps of the 8th British Army, 91th and 34th US Army divisions and the Partisan Brigades Garibaldi and Maiella). Parma and Reggio Emilia were liberated on April 24th, Milan and Turin on April 25th, Verona on April 26. On April 27th Benito Mussolini, on the run, was captured by the partisans and, executed the day after in Dongo, near the Como lake, together with his mistress, Claretta Petacci, who refused to leave him. The _Instrument of local surrender of German and other forces under the command or control of the German Commander-in-Chief Southwest was signed in Caserta on April 28th by Colonel Von Schweinitz and Major Wenner. Ceasefire was effective after May 3rd._

(Collage of different historical sources)

A lot of endnotes below, but I hope you'll like them.

Chapter 25 – (Our bubble) has burst

We have to leave the villa; in days, hours maybe, it will no longer be safe for us. It was protected by German power and that is melting quickly. When we hear on the radio that Bologna has been liberated, we decide to go back there, where the Allies and the CLN will be in control. There is very little to pack, Bella has only the clothes she had on when she was taken, plus a couple of slightly large shirts she has pilfered from Signora Dal Camin drawers, as she is reluctant to wear her silk one. She wants to keep it for some special occasion now, she says. She also takes with her the bathrobe and the prudish nightgown she has been using, not that often, I must say. Everything finds a place in my backpack. I fill a smaller backpack I found in the house with food for Bella, or for bartering. Who knows?

Money is going to be a problem, I fear. German currency is not going to be good anymore. I have some lire, but not much. In my underground secret place in Bologna, I have left my dollars, unusable then, but maybe I can retrieve them now. I don't feel that I should go on stealing.

We leave well after midnight and, carrying her on my shoulders and running, I reach Bologna at dawn. It is cloudy for the moment, but it could be sunny as the morning advances, so we need a place to stay. Bella, however, wants to see her house again, to see if it was bombed or not, to see who is living there.

Now walking, we cross Via Castiglione and after a couple of turns we reach her house, which is still standing. She is nervous as hell when she looks at the names on the brass plaque by the intercom. Her apartment's number was 9, the name printed near it is "Sergio Modanesi".

"But," she gasps, "Professor Modanesi was a friend of my father!"

She presses the button. A woman's voice from the house phone asks who is ringing and she answers that she is Isabella Finzi.

"Oh dear, come up here, come up," says the disembodied voice, releasing the door. Bella runs up the 3 flights without bothering with the elevator.

An old lady is standing on the flat's threshold.

"Isabella, it is you, you are alive," she cries. "Please, come in and let me call my nephew." I enter too and she looks at me rather surprised, but then she goes to the black telephone on the antechamber's wall and dials a number.

From the telephone call, her mind and what she tells Bella afterward, I can finally make sense of it.

Before deportations started and Jews' houses were requisitioned – something that was likely to happen and did in fact happen - Bella's father rented his house to professor Modanesi and registered the contract. When the Finzis had to disappear, Modanesi asked his aunt, who lived in the country and knew his nephew's friends well, to inhabit it for long periods. In this way the house, rented to a Christian academician and occupied by his relative, was not given to somebody else. It was requisitioned on paper, but not touched.

Half an hour later the Professor arrives, with a small leather bag. He embraces Bella.

"When we heard what had happened to the Morellis' farm, we thought that you also had died, he says, "God, I am so happy. What happened, how did you escape?"

Before leaving the villa we had decided on the story we would tell, if needed. A not completely untrue one but such as not to give my secret away,

So Bella introduces me by my Swiss alias, and explains that, during a stop of the train under an airplane attack, her fellow prisoners had managed to open the wagon's door and all escaped. She had gone on walking for 2 days, until she had reached the Garda lake and finally had collapsed on a bench in the Pacengo's promenade, so tired and famished that not even the fear to be captured could make her take another step. Enters Emil, a young Swiss businessman, out on an early morning stroll. He speaks with her, understands that she is a damsel in distress and offers her the sanctuary of the vacation house he has rented, hoping to spend in this off season quiet resort the last convulsed period, till the war ends. Well, the story would not hold water if investigated seriously, but the Professor accepts it at face value, thanking me profusely. In his mind I see clearly that he does not think my motivations were completely selfless, he suspects that we have something going on, but he does not want to touch the issue.

He has a lot of things to tell Bella, though, so we adjourn to the kitchen for a cup of coffee, while the aunt and her maid go to pack. The intention is to give Bella her house back immediately. We produce real coffee from Bella's backpack and the Swiss labeled tin, courtesy of the Dal Camins, gives substance to my Swiss identity.

After half an hour the expression on Bella's face is stunning, it illuminates the kitchen like the sun (which has not made an appearance yet, fortunately).

The professor received from her father and kept safe for her not only the house, but her mother's jewels, all the family certificates and documents, a sizable amount of cash, and the information on how to access an account on the Credit Suisse in Lugano, where there is a substantial sum awaiting her.

"In the instructions he left to the Bank when he brought part of his money there" he says, "it is clearly stated that the people who could access the account were your mother, and in case she did not survive him, yourself. He went to Switzerland when it was still possible for him to do so. Would that he had decided to stay there with your mother and you…" he concludes sadly.

He thinks that is only a matter of a few days, and the war will really end. He is now a prominent figure in the local CLN's chapter and, as soon as it becomes possible, he is going to help her to bring her money back to Italy and, if so she wishes, to get legally emancipated. Otherwise, being an orphan and not yet 21, she should get a tutor, but he is sure she does not want that.

His mind is nice and open. He perfectly understands why a girl who experienced what Bella has experienced would wish to become a legal adult. Plus, he thinks, she is not a girl anymore, but a woman, if, as he rightly suspects, I am her lover.

Shortly after that we are left to ourselves. The old lady called a taxi to carry her luggage and went away with Professor Modanesi. He told Bella to settle in, take her time and in a few days he would call her to set in motion all the administrative actions that had to be addressed. Anything she needed in terms of practicalities he would be happy to provide.

Had Bella been alone, he probably would be insisting to see her sooner, but the fact that he is a widower makes him hesitate. He does not know how to be a proper host, especially to young people, and he is unwilling to make assumptions about the relationship between his friend's young daughter and the young man who has accompanied her home. So eventually he settles with the idea of helping her in all that she needs, but letting her all the time and space she needs to adjust. Moreover, my presence makes him slightly uneasy. Nothing strange here.

Bella starts exploring her house. I feel that she needs to be alone, so I sit quietly in the living room, while she does it. Like an adorable hunter she comes back to me, showing her discoveries, laughing, crying, squealing in delight, depending on what she has found.

The Modanesis had put away things, but not thrown away anything that they thought important or valuable. So she finds the family photo albums, and for those she cries, clothes that had belonged to her and to her mother, and that she is going to work on and certainly use, her two favorite dolls, her mother's typewriter, her children's books ….

In the study room that her parents shared, the volumes are all there, apparently, she says, as well as her mother's dictionaries and the copies of the books she translated, both with her name and her pen name.

Her parents are dead, but all her memories are being restored to her, so she is more happy than sad. She has suffered, but her spirit was not crushed. Mine was.

I imagine myself going back to my house in Philadelphia and the idea is appalling. I feel that I would desecrate it with my very presence, a killer who has feasted on human blood. I don't think I'll ever be able to return there.

I don't want to dwell on it and I also notice that is past noon and, in her frenzy of discovery, Bella is forgetting to eat. I go to the kitchen and try to prepare something for her. Watching her all the time I think I have learned something. With notable class, the old lady left to us whatever there was in the kitchen. I put water to boil, deciding to serve pasta al _burro e parmigiano_, parmesan and butter, that is. I should be able to manage it.

When it is ready, I call her, and she comes to the table, smiling.

"Edward, you cooked, thank you. Mmm, _pasta al burro_. I adore it. Do you know, though, that they call it la _pasta dei cornuti_, meaning the cuckolds' pasta?"

"Why?"

"Because it is so easy and fast to prepare that the wife has time to spend with her lover, this is the reason." She laughs and I laugh with her. But something is bothering me, something I don't want to see.

After she has eaten she goes back to her research, and I sit again, with a book I have found in Professor Finzi's study. It looks interesting. It is called _Americana_, and is a collection of modern American writers' short stories. But, after some time, I realize I have not read a word.

A terrible thought has insinuated itself in my mind:

_Bella is safe, no longer persecuted. She has a house, money, loving friends. My task is done. _

Chapter endnotes

Now don't kill me. Do you think he will be so strong (or so foolish) as to leave her? Well, be sure not to miss next chapter.

I have a present for you. I always thought that the passionate Italian song _Meravigliosa creatura_, by Gianna Nannini, expresses completely the passion of Bella for Edward. I discovered that my idea was not very original and a Twilight inspired video already existed. I translated the lyrics. If you want it all, I can send it by e-mail. Just let me know through my profile.

**Lire**. The Italian currency underwent a lot of changes during the war and immediately after it. At a certain moment there were the Kingdom minted Lire, and, under the Allied forces' occupation, the American minted Lire (called Am-lire). They coexisted and their value fluctuated. I don't want to go into this, too complicated and completely boring. So I'll just call them Lire.

The Social Republic requisitioned the assets belonging to deported or escaped Jews, including real estate. A special office was set up to deal with it. After the war the survivors or their heirs retrieved them, but it took some time. There were loopholes, however, and the mechanism concocted by Professor Finzi and Professor Modanesi ensured that the house was not allocated to other people, so that Bella could have it back immediately.

The good Professor Modanesi …nothing unbelievable here. In Rome my grandfather kept safe the gold and the precious stones of a Jewish jeweler who had his shop near his hat shop in Via del Corso. The jeweler and his family fled and escaped deportation, while the treasure slept out the war in our terrace under the geraniums planted in a big flower pot. After the war the jewelergot back everything. In gratitude, he gave to my grandparents a big and beautiful crystal and silver bowl that is still in the family. My nephew has it! So, nice things did happen during the war, not only awful ones.

At the time official adulthood was reached at 21, not at 18, as it is the law now.

_Americana_ is an anthology cured by the Sicilian writer Elio Vittorini and its publication was a great event for anti-fascist culture in Italy. It presented the best modern American authors to a public that did not know them at all. Surprisingly, it was published in 1942, during the war, that is, albeit incomplete and without the notes. Some say that, due to the harsh social realities contained in some of the stories, the Fascist regime misguidedly thought it would serve as anti US propaganda. The complete edition was published only in 1968. People like Prof Finzi and his wife would certainly have secured a copy of the book.


	26. Chapter 26 Vampire Gigolo

**The Parachutist, by Camilla**

Chapter 26 Vampire Gigolo

I don't know how long I have been sitting here, frozen, not even breathing. _I am no good for her, I will have to leave, I always knew it, there is nothing I can offer her, she deserves a normal future, oh Lord give me the strength …_

I am trembling. In minutes she will be back in the living room and she will see all this on my face.. no, I am not ready yet. Desperate for time to compose myself, I go to the upright piano in a corner of the room. Perhaps I can get busy tuning it, anything to distract me. But, when I press the keys I discover that it is perfectly tuned, Evidently the old lady played, bless her.

I have not touched a piano since I was changed, but it feels so natural, I sit down and start tentatively playing, I don't even know what. Chopin probably, my fingers know the composer's work, while a battle rages in my head. Bella comes to the door, sees me sitting at the piano, says she has still a lot to do and is happy that I have found something to entertain myself with.

Yeah, entertain.

Bella, Bella, Bella, can I express with music what you represent for me? What you are to me? From my still heart notes flow to my fingers. You are beautiful, but subtly so, funny, unassuming and fearless. And you are strong, so strong, a steel thread under soft silk, insinuating yourself in me, day after day, coiling around me. In the farm everything was so simple, now everything is impossible, but I am still yours, forever. A musical phrase repeats itself, excruciatingly sweet, it seems to disappear, then it resurfaces again …. Slowly I am composing a song, Bella's song. The theme stops a while, re starts, it grows and grows … it describes you, Bella, _come sei veramente,_ how you really are…

_Oh darling, I love you so … but, just because I love you I should let you go. _

When I think I have it all, I repeat the song from the beginning to the end. Then I feel my neck prickling, turn and Bella is standing behind me, her face awash with tears.

"You," she cries, "you are leaving me. Don't lie to me. This is your good bye, isn't it?"

Christ, how perceptive can she be?

I don't answer, my gaze lowered, my breath ragged.

"No, Noo," she screams grabbing my shoulders, trying to shake me. "You cannot do this to me, you cannot do this to yourself. I told you already the first day we were in the villa. I was not going to let you go unless you really wanted to. Now look at me, dammit. Let me see your eyes**. Do-you-really-want-to-leave-me?"**

I cannot lie to her.

"No, but I must. Bella, now that you are safe. I am no good for you; I will steal your life even if I don't kill you."

"You can't steal what is already yours. Edward, I love you and you love me. This is the important thing, all that counts. You must have faith in yourself. Please don't hate yourself so. This kills me, losing you kills me, I can't bear it, I can't …"

She is crying desperately now and her tears are like a flood, sweeping away my resolve. I too can't bear it. Selfish, weak monster that I am, I cannot leave her.

I crush her in my arms.

"Shh love, _basta_, enough, I am not going anywhere. As long as you want me to, I'll stay, I'll stay, I promise, shh..."

We don't speak much after that, our bodies speak for us, expressing what words cannot say, because all the unresolved issues are still here, we don't know how to address them, and yet, not to be together is unthinkable. I know that I will never hurt her now, I will never sink my teeth into her flesh, it would be like sinking them into my own. We are one being, half human, half vampire, meant to be so, walking a path whose end we can't see.

Shaky, lopsided and fragile, our bubble is back.

…***…

The war in Italy has officially ended. The surrender of German troops in Italy was signed in Caserta and everybody thinks that Germany's surrender to the Allies will follow in a matter of days.

Here in Bologna things are slowly getting back to normal, a new free of Fascism normalcy. Good, at least this has been accomplished. Some nights I go hunting and, just once, I went to my subterranean refuge to retrieve my clothes, my few dollars and other things I wanted to keep. I then used all my strength to make the entrance collapse. I said my goodbye one last time to Egon Christmann and left the place forever.

Bella went with Professor Modanesi to the BNL Bank and spent hours signing power of attorneys and letters, so that the bank could start the procedure needed to get her money back from Switzerland. For the moment she wanted only a part of it, she decided. Truly, being still a minor, she was not really entitled to sign, but, thanks to the professor and his political standing, they overlooked the issue. In any case, when money is coming back to a country and not going out of it, there are not a lot of difficulties. Bella and her mentor also visited the Minors' Court, to see about her emancipation. Being a victim of racial persecution and orphaned for the same reason, her petition is entitled to a preferential treatment, and the Court's decision could take a couple of months, hopefully less.

She invited Sergio Modanesi for dinner and cooked a very nice meal for him. With steely determination I ate some of it, a small sacrifice for the sake of my human charade.

But, most of the time we are alone and our erotic frenzy is back. In this way we avoid discussing the future. Some days we don't even bother to dress. I have played the piano for her, she sitting between my legs, nude as Adam and Eve before the fall, until the music slowed and was forgotten.

At night she sleeps in my arms on her dead parents' bed, which is the only double bed in the house. She considered the matter and then said that she was sure they would not mind, they would be happy for her.

As more days pass the abnormality of living with a vampire is obvious: I can't go out during the day, because it is often sunny and because I don't want to encounter people who met me during my Resistance activities. Now some of the people I knew then are in politics, there are public events and commemorations, while I absolutely need to stay inconspicuous. So I read, play the piano, listen to the radio and make love. At night, when I am thirsty, I run to the Appennini slopes and hunt. I encourage Bella to go out, though, to see if other friends of her family survived, to reacquaint herself with her town.

And today she comes back full of packages, obviously she has been shopping. She tells me that the Della Seta family has resurfaced from hiding and has reopened its elegant ladies and gentlemen store with a big sale of all the pre-war articles that evidently survived, well concealed somewhere. She was recognized, feted and offered big discounts so she bought underwear, for herself and for me too, shorts and undershirts made with the best cotton fabric to be found, that here is called _filo di Scozia_. Plus, she presents me with two pairs of beautiful silk pajamas. I am moved, albeit I smile a little, thinking of our naughty habits. But, it is true, when she finally sleeps in my arms it is better that we don't lie skin to skin all night, due to my wintry temperature.

I put one of the pajamas on, she chose a perfect fit, but after that she wants it off and proceeds to unbutton it. Then she makes me recline on the bed and straddles me, pulling my pants into her fists and slowly tugging them down, stopping just before my crotch is unveiled. Tease. Under the silk I am fully erect by now. Letting go of the pajama she plays with my chest, concentrating on the nipples.

"They are like pebbles," she muses, "but If I do this (lick) or this, (bite) they become harder and smaller." The answer is irresistible, even if I have some difficulty speaking.

"Well, down there, there is something that would become harder and bigger if you do that, care to see it?"

She laughs so hard that she is incapacitated for some minutes. Then she follows my suggestion.

The playful mood we are enjoying continues afterward.

"I feel," I say, stretched naked under her gaze, "like a kept man. I like it!"

"How so?"

"Well, I am living in your house, you take care of all expenses and give me costly presents, my only task being to pleasure you …"

"Not to speak of all the champagne and caviar you consume … indeed you are, what? A gigolo, I think that's the word."

"Sure I am," I confirm, "I should take you dancing, I have been remiss in my duties."

"Dancing, mm, I don't know. Never done it much." Bella wrinkles her nose adorably.

"Me neither," I have to confess.

"Then you can't be a proper gigolo and there is only one way out: I have to make an honest vampire of you."

Now Bella's face is very serious, her eyes boring into mine. I feel like I am on race course, speeding, speeding …

She rises, and, clasping my hand, she makes me stand with her.

"Edward Masen," she asks, "will you marry me and take me to America with you?

The same words, the same question I asked her in the farm, when I was alive.

I am mad if I think I can say yes, that such a thing is possible.

"Marry," I ask her, "like 'until death does us part?' You know I can't die."

"_Si_, Edward, I know," she says softly, "as long as my frail body endures, until I get old and die and then I will have to leave you, unless, unless …. I become like you."

The thing that could not be said, that could not be thought, that I did not allow myself to wish, is here, in the open. I know that I should reject the very idea of it, but now that she has said it everything is changing, infinite universes, infinite possibilities seem to be opening. I will not deny her outright, you don't say no outright to a gift like the one she is offering me. She probably doesn't realize what she is proposing, what it would mean, what it would imply, but I owe her the respect it deserves. Even if what she wants cannot be.

But her first proposal I will accept. We will be together, for her natural lifespan at least. I know I will find a way to follow her when she leaves me forever. Or, maybe, maybe…No, I'll not think about it now, there are more urgent things.

"Yes, Isabella Finzi, I will marry you." I kiss her for a long time, and then I tell her to get dressed.

"I need to find Carlisle Cullen now, and you have to help me."

Chapter endnotes

I hope you liked this chapter. If so, please send me some love.

The song that I imagine Edward composing for Bella has been indeed written, but some 60 years after this story. It is _Come sei veramente_, by Giovanni Allevi, a young and now famous Italian composer. It was eventually chosen by Spike Lee … for the advertisement of a car he has filmed (and it was not even a Volvo…). Never mind, if you don't know it, just google the Italian title and the composer's name and you will find it on You tube.


	27. Chapter 27 Carlisle

**The Parachutist, by Camilla**

A/N As soon as I wrote the chapter's title I felt it had to be in the good doctor's PoV.

Chapter 27 -Carlisle

May 1945

Carlisle

A slow morning in the hospital, a _Casa di Cura_ in the outskirts of Bologna we had temporarily requisitioned and converted to our needs. I did not have much to do. The war in Europe had ended, Hitler was dead and soon hostilities would end in Asia too. I would hopefully get an extended leave of absence, return to the States, report to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC, where my adventure started, and finally get my discharge. I had done more than my share and now the memory of my family consumed me. I missed them all, but I ached for Esme.

I had seen her only once in two and half years, when I had two weeks' leave last June and she had been able to join me in London. It had been a complicated effort to get both of us there at the same time, but very rewarding. We never left our hotel and disposed of the room service meals in the toilet, not having had to ingest them beforehand, obviously. It is difficult for mated vampires to be separated for long periods of time; we missed each other excruciatingly, in the physical sense as well as emotionally.

My musing was interrupted by a knock on the door and an orderly came in, telling me that there was an Italian girl who was asking for me. Quite puzzled, I agreed to see her. I had no Italian patients. In fact, I had almost no patients anymore, as the ones who could travel were being shipped back to the States.

She was a pretty brunette, introducing herself as Isabella Finzi. Ah, a Jew then, with that surname, finally safe from persecution. I did not notice the eyes' narrowing that even the most well behaved people show when they see my face for the first time. So, she was informed on how I looked.

"I bring a message to you from Lt Edward Masen," she said in a British accented English, completely surprising me.

"Where is he?" I asked.

"In my house," she answered. "He would have come himself, but … the sun, you know."

A feather could have floored me. Here there was this human who knew everything about Edward, evidently, and, come to think of it, about me too. The implications were staggering. Should the Volturi be aware of this, there would be hell to pay.

"It took quite a lot to find you, we weren't even sure you were in Bologna, " the girl said with satisfaction, evidently not understanding or not caring about what was worrying me. "but eventually we were able to. Now, if you could come to my house when you are free… Edward really needs to speak with you."

Still dazed, I told her that I was free in the afternoon, and she gave me an address and a phone number, thanked me and left.

Some hours later I rang the bell of an elegant 19th century building in the city center, where I read the name Finzi pasted over another name. The door opened, I went up, Isabella let me in and in the living room there was Edward, his eyes as golden as mine. The girl said something about the need to go and buy something, and left us, to give us privacy, probably. I could not stop looking at his face; I could not stop beaming, exultant that he had indeed managed to abstain from human blood. Nothing else was more important than this. I touched his arm, and after a second, to embrace came naturally to us.

"Last August my eyes were blood red," he said, having read me and unwilling to get undeserved praise. "I did kill many Germans, making their bodies disappear where they would never be found."

"So, why did you stop?"

With what I took to be complete honesty, he told me what had happened to him in the past months, his interaction with the partisans and his selective human hunting, till the terrible day last August when he had drained a honest man and had been overcome by self disgust and shame. From then on he had not drank human blood any more.

This part of his story was clear, and quite moving. But there was something more that I needed to understand.

"Edward," I asked, "who is Isabella? Why does she know about the secret?"

"I met Bella at the farm where I lived for some months after my drop in Northern Italy, waiting for an opportunity to go back to the lines. She is a Jew whom the farmer kept concealed too. Last March, he paid with his life for it. Anyway, we fell in love and planned to marry after the war. I did not tell you about her in Castelporziano, because just naming her was too painful. I had been turned and I thought I had lost her forever. But… but things went differently and I was able to save her from deportation after the Militia ransacked the farm and took her. We have been together since and I told her everything. I did it to explain why I could not be true to my promises. I owed her that, and I knew she would not betray my secret but, … but Bella is very determined. She is prepared to marry a vampire, so I will marry her. It is madness, probably, but I can't deny her anything anymore." He concluded, as a slow smile illuminated his face, that, for a moment, looked soft, and very human.

It was really mind blowing, in my long existence I never had encountered a situation like this one. He was sharing the house with this human girl evidently, and wanted to marry her. I needed to know more, I needed to understand this unheard of relationship. Was it possible that they…? Since he could read what I was thinking, I had to ask it openly, despite the lack of delicacy.

"Pardon me, Edward, but when you say, 'we have been together' you mean that you and Isabella… have been intimate?"

"Yes," was his curt answer, something like defiance in his eyes.

"And you were never tempted to…?" He immediately saw what I meant.

"Yes, I almost killed her, once, but then something happened that I can't explain, and now I am not even thirsty when I am with her. I can't cause her pain, she is everything to me."

"You are an extraordinary creature, Edward, you really are." I murmured, entranced. "No vampire I know, even among our 'vegetarian' kind, would have such restraint. I know some succubi, and they do manage relationships with human males that don't end in bloodshed, but it took those females years of exercise, so to speak, to avoid killing their lovers…"

As a scientist, I was extremely curious about the way he was able to check not only his blood thirst, but also his strength during intercourse. However, I was not going to ask it, at least for the moment. It was enough to know that, somehow, he was doing it. There were more urgent matters to address.

But, you cannot fool a mind reader.

"We can speak of that too, if you wish," he said. "I admit that I also have questions that you, as a vampire and a doctor, can probably answer. But, you are right, there are more urgent things to discuss.

"To me," I started, "the most dangerous aspect of the situation is that you have given the secret away. Even if you marry her, you will not be safe from the Volturi. If they discover you, and learn that you have a human bride who knows what you are, they will condemn you to death, and Bella with you."

"They don't know that I exist," he objected, "and I plan to go back to the States with her. For this, I know I need your help."

"No place is far enough for them," I answered, "albeit, I agree, it will not happen immediately, if you leave Italy you will have more time. Plus, my offer is still standing, more than ever. If you both join my family, we can protect you to a certain extent, in the sense that Alice can monitor the Volturi and know in advance if you are in danger of discovery. But the only real safeguard is that Bella too becomes immortal. Have you thought about it?"

"It seems to me the ultimate blasphemy, to terminate her human life," Edward said harshly, "but yes, she has thought of this and I did too. However, we haven't decided anything, not even discussed it properly, and she certainly doesn't realize what it means to be a vampire. Her motivation is that she knows she will get old and die, while I won't. She fears that I would follow her after she dies."

"Would you?" I asked.

"Yes, I think so." Behind those simple words the firmness of his resolve was unmistakable.

She must be one exceptional woman," I observed, "and I can't wait to know her better"

On cue, the door opened and Bella was back.

Now, with her, it was time to discuss practicalities. We sat around the dining room table and worked through them.

She was a minor, so she could not marry without parental authorization, but she was going to get emancipated very soon, a matter of a few weeks, so this was not going to be a problem. The problem was Edward.

"If I don't resurface as Edward Masen now, I will never be able to do it," he said, having obviously given a lot of thought to the matter. "Presently, I get along with a fake Swiss passport, one, however, that probably would not pass muster with the Swiss authorities. And I would like to marry Bella with my real name. Not only that, I have my inheritance in Philadelphia, and I don't want to lose it."

It was true, he had to come back, it was not too late, but barely so. He probably was now labeled as missing in action but, if his name came up again as a living person, he would be considered a deserter. Obviously, if he reappeared, he would need a good story to explain his absence and, even more obviously, he could not go back to military life, not even for a short while. Good conundrum. I considered options and then it hit me.

"I think you are very, very ill, Edward, so much so that you should be discharged for health reasons," I said, "let me work around it, I have some ideas."

That night Edward and I hunted together. He saw in my mind that I desired it and it was enough that he mentioned it to Bella for her to insist that we go. The way they were attuned to each other was magical to see.

He knew that part of the Appennini near Bologna like the back of his hand, he knew where deer were likely to be found and led us there. After we had fed he did something that I found incredibly endearing: before we buried the carcasses he cut a piece of meat from one of them, wrapped it in waxed paper and put it in a cloth shopping bag he had brought with him.

"Meat is still rationed and hard to come by," he explained, "and Bella loves venison…."

I understood that this must have been a routine practice for them, the vampire seeing to the needs of his human mate. Weird and marvelous.

I had used the word mate in my mind and he saw that, and smiled at me. Then he must have seen that I wondered about other aspects of their life as a couple. He evidently understood that there was nothing prurient in my curiosity.

"OK, let's speak of it" he said. "I don't mind, and then I have something to ask you. As for how we do it," he continued, since he had seen my unspoken question, "the first time, it was in the so called missionary position, more or less. It was not ideal, because I was afraid to crush her if I lost control just for a moment, so we found later that the best option is with her on top, and … it also works if I do it from behind …. "

Despite his detached tone, I was sure he would be blushing, if he could. I really was starting to love him as a son, this wonderful young … man who had battled his inhuman nature and seemed to have prevailed over it in such a short time. His confidences and his trust honored me.

"But the truly amazing thing," he went on, "is that my body is getting unspoken messages from hers, like Bella's body is tutoring mine, letting me know what I can do, when something is too much or it is not, when I could hurt her. So, albeit I have to curb my strength, or my… desires sometimes, there is nothing heroic in my restraint. I know I will not hurt her. The fact that I am so cold does not seem to trouble her too much, and of course there are ways I can get warmer, like a long, hot shower… now that it is almost summer, it is less of a problem, obviously. Better than an electric fan …

"Well, that's it."Edward concluded, "and now to my questions. I don't know how dangerous my venom is for her, how much of it is present in my… my release. So we always use condoms, or sometimes, _coitus interruptus_, and also in foreplay we avoid that…"

"On this I can answer you," I said quickly "this has been researched by the Volturi, – Aro is curious of everything about our vampiric nature - and no, venom would be dangerous for her only if she had a bleeding open wound. So, as foreplay goes," I was sure he had been referring to oral sex, "there is no danger. However, even if there are no official records of male vampires impregnating human females, I would be careful. There are the incubus' legends, quite consistent, and in those stories women did get pregnant, and the result of those pregnancies was lethal. The mothers always died. So, you have to be prudent. However, you could try to use your sense of smell. You can probably perceive when she has ovulated and is fertile. The odor changes. I know that I could notice it, when I had to work with female patients …

This, of course, is a concern only if Bella remains human. Female vampires cannot conceive, as their bodies cannot change."

We sat in silence for some time. I did not know what Edward was thinking, but I suspected that it was about Bella never becoming a mother.

"Hell ,"he said suddenly, "how I would like to be able to read her mind, to really understand what she thinks."

"You cannot read her mind?" I asked, surprised.

"No, I can't. I don't know why. On the one hand, it is like heaven. When I am alone with her I only hear a blessed silence and it is so restful. But, I am afraid she edits what she tells me when we discuss the future, suppressing her worries, concealing her fears …That Bella would renounce forever to be a mother was one of my main concerns about us marrying," he concluded ruefully, "but I think there is no going back now."

After that we returned to the city.

Chapter endnotes

Are you happy with Carlisle's PoV? I tried to describe the beginning of a true father and son relationship between him and Edward. Please let me know what you think.

No hybrids, no Renesmee in this story. That has already been written, much better than I could ever try to (Yes, I am a true fan of BD).

I got rather bored with condoms, so I thought of the powerful sense of smell of vampires, in order to give them some nice free-of-worry love time. I think that I am not the first author to go there. One thing I have not dealt with, namely Bella's menses and their effect on Edward. It is a perfectly legitimate issue, when the lover is a vamp, but I'll not address it, I think. Maybe in the sequel, if there is a sequel ...

A _Casa di Cura_ is like a small, private hospital, usually not covering all medical branches.


	28. Chapter 28 Porphyria

**The Parachutist, by Camilla**

Chapter note

**Porphyria:** A diverse group of disorders in which the production of heme – a major component of hemoglobin, is disrupted, resulting in the buildup of chemicals called porphyrins in the body, affecting the nervous system, the skin, or both.

Edward needs to be discharged by the American Army for health reasons. Carlisle will fake-diagnose him with Porphyria, this rare blood condition which, funnily enough, is also known as the 'Vampire disease' and might be at the origin of vampire legends. If you just google the name, you may be surprised by what you will find. But, as I am not writing about medicine, this chapter will only give such information as to lend credibility to the story.

I am very grateful to Ginevra, who alerted me to this illness.

Chapter 28 Porphyria

Later, in our bed, I am telling Bella about all that passed between Carlisle and me when she was not present. I don't want to influence her decisions, but she must be aware of the danger posed by the Volturi.

"The moment they discover that I am a vampire living with a human, and that you obviously know about immortals, they will hunt us down," I tell her sadly, "Carlisle has reminded me of it, and he is right. Love, before that happens you will have to be turned. Or, we must end our story now."

"Don't say this, even as a joke," is her heated answer, "how can you think of it? Would you leave me?"

"I can't live without you, and I won't. But, the change is a terrible experience, and this existence… is not easy. Aren't you afraid? Don't you realize what you will be renouncing?"

She reaches out to kiss me, long and hard.

"Yes, I am afraid, but not to the point of considering any other alternative," she says when she can speak again, "and, if we marry and you do not turn me at some point, I will get older and older … shall we be together when I look like your mother … or your grandmother? And then I'll die. You are not telling me what you think it will happen afterwards. What you will do. But I know, and I don't want it to happen."

I was right; she had predicted what I would do quite accurately. She understands me perfectly, by now.

"Well," I say, because Bella is right and still the idea of her changing troubles me, you are not yet 20 and I am frozen at 23. We have time. Let's marry and get to America as soon as possible, and then, we will see…"

I want to move away from this issue, I am not ready yet to figure it out. Would I bite her, would I be able to and not kill her, or should we ask Carlisle? As the image forms in my mind I can barely suppress a growl. She is mine, all mine. It will be an act of supreme cruelty, but also of supreme intimacy…no, it will have to be me, somehow. One day I will indeed sink my teeth in her tender flesh and taste her blood …the very thought of it terrifies and arouses me at the same time. What kind of animal am I?

An animal that now can barely wait another minute before having her and giving himself to her, whatever comes first. So I tell her of the rest of my discussion with Carlisle. Not word by word, she will need to know Carlisle better, before she is comfortable with the idea that I shared with him some details of our intimacy. Instead, I concentrate on what he told me about what is safe and what isn't.

And now she too is aroused. This time, when she takes me in her heavenly mouth, it is no longer necessary that I tell her to move when I come.

----***----

Carlisle calls and tells us he wants to see us this afternoon. When he arrives he is quite smug, and amused. It is an aspect of his personality I did not suspect before.

He has found my illness; the one that he hopes will get me discharged.

I have something called "Porphyria", he tells me, a genetic blood disease, difficult to cure, with physical and neurological symptoms. The illness, however, can remain latent for years, until something triggers it on. Among the triggering factors, there is exposure to certain substances.

"In your case, my dear boy," he adds, "it was exposure to lead. Hear what happened to you. One year ago, while trying to go back to our lines, you were almost caught by the Germans, but were able to escape, and concealed yourself in a church or, to be exact, in a church's dome, in the hollow space between the upper end lower parts of it. You might not know it, but domes are often made of lead, among other things and, since you remained there a long time, almost starving yourself to death, when you emerged you were very sick. Symptoms of Porphyria, so that you know, are vomiting, diarrhea, pain in your arms, legs or back, muscle pain, numbness, seizures, fever, hallucinations, disorientation, paranoia, and – note this well - if exposed to sunlight, erythema and blisters. Isn't it fantastic? You therefore collapsed, and were taken in by poor peasants that kept you safe. For months you were a total wreck, not even knowing whom you were, devastated by hallucinations. Luckily for you, a Jewish woman, also in hiding, took care of you. Of course you both had no idea of the nature of your illness.

"Now this is surely something that should have you discharged and would explain your absence until now. The problem is that, according to rules, it is an Army medical Commission that should examine you. That won't do at all, I am afraid. So it is time I cash in on favors that are owed to me.

"I'll go to Rome, and I'll see what I can do. Before that, you have to come to see me at the hospital, so that there is an official record of me visiting you. You will come in uniform, with your face covered in gauze, so the sun will not matter. Porphyria's lesions will justify it."

---***---

Some days have passed. I went to see Carlisle as he had instructed me and then he left for Rome, carrying with him a medical report, I suppose. While we awaited his return, Bella said that she wanted to go back to the farm. She needed to know if somebody had come back there and, in case, to let them know that she had survived. She asked Prof. Modanesi to accompany her, asking him not to mention that now she had a Swiss fiancé. Of course I did not go with her, Even in a cloudy day, which was not the case, I would have surprised everybody with my changed appearance and Swiss identity, and there were too many things that would have made any story I told very suspicious.

When she came back she was quite happy. If Papà Morelli, sadly, was no more, everybody else was alive and well. The sons were back from the mountain and working hard to reconstruct the barn and restore the other buildings. The women had eventually been released from the _Caserme Rosse _before the liberation. It was not the only case; in a still rather patriarchal society women were considered to have a sort of attenuated responsibility. They had to obey the head of the family, who had already paid for the crime of harboring a Jew.

Don Luigi, Bella discovered, was no longer the P_arroco_ of Santa Maria della Pace, the Vicar, that is, but had been moved somewhere else before the end of the war, and that had probably saved his life, as the Militia was sniffing around him. So the Morellis had not known about my visit to him, which was just as well. Bella had a story ready about how she escaped from the train, in fact, the same one we had told Modanesi, one that did not end in Pacengo sul Garda, but in a convent, where the nuns had taken her in. This also had happened often and was a believable lie.

Before the end of the visit, however, she had found a moment to speak alone with Piera, now happily reunited with her husband. They were not going to stay in the farm, though, but would be moving to Reggio Emilia, where a comrade of Mino owned a car repair shop and had offered him a job. Piera had told Bella that Lorenzo's corpse had been found behind his house in the days immediately following the Allies' arrival. He had been shot in the head.

"I think Piera knows who killed him," Bella observed, "but she did not go into it. So, he was probably the one who betrayed me, and caused the death of _Papà_ Morelli, but now we can both forget about him."

….*** ….

Carlisle is back from Rome, very happy with his work. He went to see Colonel Thompson, in the OSS office in Via Sicilia.

"I had a medical report for him, signed by myself and two colleagues," he tells us. Today Carlisle has decided to take off his scars, for the time he is inside our house. He wants Bella to know him as he really is, and she is looking at him with big eyes. Indeed he is very handsome, as I remembered from Castelporziano, and I am a tiny bit jealous. Well, not really…

"One of the other colleagues who signed the report," he continues, "was absent when Edward came to the hospital, but I asked him to sign anyway, as I did not want to submit you to another ordeal. He has personal reasons to be grateful to me and signed gladly, on trust. The other signature is a fake one. I am quite good at it and the man who supposedly signed has left Bologna already and is going to the Philippines. I doubt that anybody will question him. You see, Bella, we vegetarian vampires might abstain from killing men, but when it comes to other crimes, we are well into them. We lie, we cheat, we forge, we steal, sometimes. We have to."

"Jews had to do the same, to save themselves," Bella answers. They smile to each other with perfect understanding,

"So I had a medical report that looked as it was issued by a medical Commission, or near it," Carlisle goes on, and I gave it to Thompson. I told him I had a tentative diagnosis of Porphyria, an illness so serious, rare and little known that I doubted it could be cured well by the Army's medical services, swarmed with sick veterans. I said that you were rich, and could privately afford the best that science could offer. What you certainly do not need are bureaucratic hassles and delays. To be examined by a plethora of doctors, to be seen by a lot of other people, would only damage further your precarious mental health. Your sickness induced paranoia is such that it is already a miracle that you, on your girlfriend's insistence, have managed to find me and ask for my help.

"And now I was asking his help in turn. I had sent you to him, and he had sent you on a mission that resulted in this, while you, duty bound, were trying to go back the Allies' lines. Now I asked him to find a way to have you discharged from the Army only on the strength of the medical report I was giving him, and to help you to go back to the United States, together with your girlfriend, in fact your fiancée, who loved you well enough to take care of you, who are alone in the world. The OSS is powerful enough to make this happen.

"Now, Thompson is a decent fellow. Furthermore, he is grateful to me, because I saved the life of one of his friends, and kept mum about the reasons why this person had been wounded in the first place. They had nothing to do with military service.

"Therefore, he is going to help. You will get your discharge and will not need to present yourself anywhere. I'll get it for you. Thompson will also help out with a visa for Bella, once you are married. I am going to follow this up."

I almost can't believe that this great man, with his subtle mind, his scientific knowledge, his psychological understanding of other people and his charity has found a way out for me. Indeed he is doing what a father would do, to help his son. Now I fully understand what being part of his family could mean. Together with Bella, he has given back hope to me.

Chapter endnotes

One of the most problematic issues I had to solve was how Edward was going to be legally discharged by the Army, thus maintaining his identity. There were rules about it that he could not be submitted to, but not easy to circumvent. I hope that the solution I found is convincing for you as I believe it to be.

The move of Piera and Mino from farm to town is part of an exodus that happened in reality: till the war, the people working in agriculture represented a 45% of the total workers'population. By 1960 the number of rural workers had gone down to 30% and the figure continued to decrease in the following years. This had momentous consequences for the modernization of Italian society.

So, now everything seems to be going well for our ill starred lovers … or not? I fear they have yet to face the harder problem. They are circling around it, but it will come out, eventually.

The War Brides Act was passed only in December 1945, too late for my plot timeline, so, to go to America, Bella will need another type of visa. Surely the OSS will not find it difficult to make the US Consulate provide one.


	29. Chapter 29 Rome

**The Parachutist, by Camilla10**

A/N

Uh, a lot of notes below. I hope you'll read them.

Chapter 29 Rome

Mid June 1945

We have left Bologna for Rome, from where, hopefully, we'll leave together for the US. I have my discharge. With it came the possibility to be repatriated care of the US Army, but I declined.

I finally made contact with my family's attorney in Philadelphia. Carlisle had written to him in advance, on official paper, telling him I had been very sick and was going to be discharged for health reasons and would be coming back to the US in a few weeks. So when I finally called him, after having waited hours for a connection, he was expecting my call, expressed his felicitations on my being alive if not well, and asked what he could do for me. I told him that I was about to marry – with a simple ceremony in the American Consulate in Rome - and would need money for the rest of my sojourn in Italy and for the journey I would do with my bride. Hiding his surprise for this new development, he explored with me what options we had; eventually the easiest thing to do was to wire money to Bella's account with the BNL Bank.

It took some time but the money eventually arrived, so at last I was no longer destitute.

Bella again invited Prof Modanesi. To make it simple, for me and for Carlisle, who also came, it was just to have coffee, still a treat for Italians. It was time to tell him a truth, namely that I was American, not Swiss, and a big untruth, making him believe that I was a spy, an officer working for the OSS. The very nature of the job allowed for not disclosing details, as they would be sensitive information and also explained why I had assumed a different identity for a while. We told him that I was going to be discharged – not mentioning the health reasons – and that, as soon Bella got her emancipation, we were going to marry in Rome, in the American Consulate and leave for the United States.

In his mind I saw that he was none too happy about all this and the original deception, but there was nothing he could really object to. The presence of Carlisle, a captain in the US Army, gave substance to the story. I told him I had left a musical academy to join the Army, but was planning to go back, and that I was independent and quite wealthy. Bella asked him to sell the house for her; she was going to leave him a power of attorney. She would pack the things she wanted to be shipped to her in America, once we had settled; anything else, bar many of the books, that he would take, could be given to the Red Cross.

So this also was taken care of. In the following days Bella and I packed everything she wanted to be sent and the few items she choose to bring with her while she travelled, in particular the family documents, her mother jewels, and the photo albums. Through the good offices of CLN she got from the _Questura_ a brand new passport in no time.

While there are less than 250 miles between Bologna and Rome, the train trip was going to take forever, as the railway had been heavily damaged and not yet fully repaired. There was no way I could avoid the sunlight pouring in from the wagon windows, so, again I had to swathe my face in gauze and wear gloves, an injured war victim. In truth, I could have run the distance in much less time than the 8 hours it took, but to leave Bella alone was not an option. Italy was not yet a safe place, as a wake of criminal activities done by unsettled people had followed the end of the war.

In Rome we had an apartment in the city center, one of the many available, rented by the week to officers or other foreigners, war correspondents and the like. Carlisle had found it for us when he had been in Rome last. Bella grumbled, saying that the rent was preposterous, but eventually acquiesced. Maybe the fact that it had a telephone appeased her. Carlisle was going to join us in a week or so, but he would get an Army flight to reach Rome.

We have spent the past days taking the necessary steps leading to our marriage. In fact, the influence of Colonel Thompson has made everything easy for us. I have been to see him, again with my face bandaged and leaning on crutches, due my Porphyria-induced frequent muscular spasms, of which I have given an award winning interpretation. He is a hard man, but he feels guilty for my supposed condition, maybe more than if I had died, so he has gone out of his way to help us. I have been also to the Consulate and all documents are ready now, as documents go. Bella has not yet been emancipated by Bologna Minors' Court, though. When this paper will be finally released, it will need to be translated into English by a registered translator and the translation has to be authenticated in its turn. All this can be done in Rome, fortunately.

So we have to wait, and we can as well take a holiday of sort. Thompson told us that he was going to be out of Rome for a few days, which means that I can maybe go strolling in the city with an uncovered face, provided I stay out of the sun. Nobody else knows me here and the 509th has left Italy long ago, to be dropped over Normandy.

Today is a Saturday and we are going shopping. The sky is overcast, and it might rain. I think it is strange for June but, Bella tells me that it is due to Saint John's snails.

As I must look very puzzled, she reports on what she heard at the grocer's next door. Apparently St John's Eve in Rome is a religious festivity, traditionally celebrated by eating snails, yes, escargots, in the area of the city's General Market, at night. Of course, in order to have snails coming out, so that you can catch and cook them, you need rain, and, for some reason – a natural phenomenon and not a miracle, hopefully - it always rains around June 20th. I shudder at the idea, even when I was human I can't imagine I could have eaten snails, and Bella shares my feeling, but we are very grateful for the heavy cloud cover.

Tomorrow, Sunday, a treat is in store for us, if the (bad) weather holds. We are going to see a soccer game. I am puzzled by it. In Salerno I saw it played in the streets, and then I asked Joe Caputo about the rules, but now I am going to see a real match. The surprise is that Bella knows a lot about soccer. She used to see games with her dad, because her mother could not be bothered. Prof. Finzi had been a supporter of the Bologna team, one of the oldest of Italy, created in 1909. At the beginning, Bella was quite bored, but he explained things to her until she started to like it and words like goal, corner, off side, and hands finally made sense.

"He told me," she reminisces, "that a good game is like a dance, the action is fluid, and you can see geometrical figures winding and unwinding on the field. After a while, I could see them and was enthralled…"

Our stroll takes us to Via del Corso, at the corner of Via Condotti. There is a jeweler and here is where we are going to buy our wedding rings. She wants them made of yellow gold. Before and during the war, the fashion was white gold, but for a reason. In much advertised and practically unavoidable propaganda ceremonies, couples donated jewels to the homeland, wedding rings included, and got steel ones in exchange. Therefore it was not considered patriotic to sport a yellow ring. Of course, rich people bought yellow gold rings to donate and had their own made of white gold or platinum, that looked more or less like the steel ones.

We select our matching pair and it is a moment of intense emotion. Here's a tangible sign of something that was not supposed to happen but will in fact happen. We both had thought that we had lost each other irrevocably. I was a bloodthirsty monster that would never be able to be near a human woman again, let alone to love her like a man, she had been taken by the Nazis and destined to an extermination camp. And yet in a few days we will marry. We don't know the exact date yet, so we cannot have it embossed inside, but we can have it done later, when we are in America. I put the little box in my pocket and it seems to radiate a warmth that goes straight to my chest. Bella had to fight tears when we made our choice and tried the rings for size, but now she wears a beautiful smile.

The shop next to the jeweler is a hat shop. I think that maybe I can buy a summer hat, with the widest brim possible. Following the suggestion of the shop owner, a tall gentleman with a hawk nose, I take a white one, made of finely woven straw.

We are going home when we encounter an ice cream cart on wheels. Bella absolutely wants a cone. She tells me that, before the war, her mother never allowed her to buy the treat from this type of cart, fearing a lack of hygiene, so she could only go to high class ice cream parlors. Of course, she was extremely envious of her schoolmates who could have the off the street cone, and she longed for it. And now I can buy her one. Chocolate and strawberry, her favorites. I think her mother was right and that the flavors surely do not come from natural ingredients, but I don't say anything. She is excited like a little girl.

To eat an ice cream cone is a race, because it is melting quickly and Bella has to lick the rivulets that drop on her hand from the cone. What her pink tongue darting in and out does to me is positively wicked. She is delighted and seems totally absorbed in what she is doing, when she suddenly says:

"One day I am going to eat ice cream off you, because it will not melt. Mmm."

After that, there is nothing for me but to reach our flat at the fastest human pace I can manage and impose on her. This night is not a condom night, and tomorrow evening we will take some quality ice cream home.

Chapter endnotes

Consider this chapter, where a lot of things are said that needed to be explained, as the quiet before the storm. Because yes, another storm is brewing, a very unexpected one.

Ideas?

"This night is not a condom night." As said in a previous chapter, on Carlisle's suggestion, now Edward has discovered that he can actually smell when Bella is ovulating and fertile. So, when she is not, they don't need to take precautions, while when she is, they have a condom night, of course. I am very happy for them.

Just in case you don't remember, the CLN, or _Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale,_ was the supreme Resistance authority, representing all the partisan brigades and the democratic parties, whatever their political orientation.

Believe it or not, it always rains in Rome around June 20th. St John's eve is the 22nd and it was also believed that witches and damned souls roamed around, so people stayed up and together. A sort of Halloween, Roman style. The snail tradition is almost gone now, but the weather usually does not disappoint, a last respite before the very hot Roman summer.

The ring charade is totally true. People was forced by the regime to be patriots and they cheated, if they could.

Well, I could not resist the idea of Edward and Bella buying their wedding rings at the Jewish jeweler I named in one of the preceding chapters' notes, and my beloved vampire choosing a summer hat in my grandfather's shop. The idea of _Nonno_ Alfredo serving Edward exhilarates me. In the following years the hat shop was visited by many American customers, so many that Granddad had his half American daughter in law (my mother) teaching English to his salesgirl, so that she could serve them better. Apart from Edward, not many clients from the US spoke Italian!

If you are wondering if it was my mother who taught me English, forget it. She was born in Italy and always spoke to me only in Italian. I owe it to a 3 months period spent in an American college, to the thousands of English novels I have read and to Friends of the Earth. To read and write is not like to understand English, though. When I see non dubbed versions of Robert's films, hell if I understand a word he says! I have to see them again and again. So frustrating.

Under the Fascist regime all the soccer words were painstakingly translated into Italian and both radio and newspapers had to adopt them, so while, for instance in France, they still use the English words to this day, in Italy goal is _rete_, corner _angolo_, off side_ fuori gioco_, penalty _rigore,_ hands _mani _and so on_._


	30. Chapter 30 Tiber Island

**The Parachutist, by Camilla****10**

Chapter 30 Tiber Island

When Bella finally falls asleep I leave and go hunting along the Via Tiberina. Eventually I find boars, but it takes time, so, before that, I dispose of a stray sheep I have happened over; a perfect rendering of the Evil Shepherd. I really dislike the ovine's' taste, ugh. I hasten home before daylight but, thank you St John, it is still overcast.

Later on, just after Bella's hurried lunch, it is time for us to go to the soccer game. The stadium is a mile off Piazza del Popolo, on the Flaminia road. The match we are going to see is the last one of a regional tournament they are having. The national championship, discontinued during the war's last years, will hopefully resume this fall, as I get from the eager minds of the people queuing with us to get their tickets. The match is Lazio-Roma and finally I get to see a proper game unfolding. It is true, sometimes I can see the geometries Bella was speaking of. But there is something else. It is a game that is full of ...tension. It could well end up with no scores at all, and that makes everybody frantic with frustration. And eventually nothing happens: 0-0. Of course the teams are booed, but I think it is fascinating game, elegant and full of suspense. And I suppose that, if one team eventually scores, its supporters would experience a cataclysmic release. Reaching for my dimmed memories I feel that American football is just muscular and does not compare. Baseball is elegant too, and I remember I liked it, but the action is continuously interrupted so that there is less suspense. I hope that with time – and by God I have time – soccer will become popular in the States too.

This time we do not walk back to the center, we take a _camionetta _ride, it is fun. I keep my arms encircled around Bella, to make sure she does not fall and nobody falls on her, as it is not a smooth going.

We leave the truck in Piazza di Spagna, admire the famous Spanish Steps, and take a stroll. And then it happens. The cloud cover has suddenly thinned and I see that in moments I could be hit by direct sunlight. Hell, I don't think that my hat will be protection enough. My shirt is open at the neck, my sleeves are rolled, I have no gloves…I need to be inside now, or I'll give to the passers by a surprising spectacle ..

"Come, a cinema, come!" Bella cries and we dart inside. I buy the tickets, not bothering to look at what it is they are showing. Here it is possible to get into a cinema at any moment, stay all day, and leave when you have had enough. The theater is hazy with smoke, but for the moment it is enough for us just to sit down in the darkness. When we have recovered enough to discover what the hell we are seeing, I look at two well known beautiful faces: Olivia de Havilland and Errol Flynn. And it is a film I have seen back home: Captain Blood.

"Oh yes, one on the screen and one right here," I say. It is so ludicrous that we both are overtaken by a fit of laughter, we are giggling like schoolgirls. Of course we are angrily shushed by the rest of the public and try to control ourselves, but when I realize that the actors are speaking in Italian, as the film is dubbed. I find it so funny that I risk erupting again. In order to stop, I start kissing Bella, an approved activity in cinemas, and it works, but then I would like to do something more and it is not a wise idea. The cinema is packed full this Sunday afternoon, with families and children, and to be thrown out for improper behavior is not an option. So eventually we calm down and watch the film.

When we exit the cinema, the sun is finally gone and more clouds have gathered. We walk holding hands to Largo Argentina. In our house there was a tattered red Touring Club guide, an edition published in the '20s, that we are using for our sightseeing. The center of this square was cleared of buildings some decades ago, to show the Roman ruins below. Brutus and Cassius murdered Julius Caesar nearby, but the exact spot is still under the Argentina Theater's building.

We walk along Via Arenula toward the river. The ancient Ghetto of Rome is on its left side. The area terminates with the majestic Synagogue - built at the beginning of this century, after Rome became the Capital of unified Italy and the Pope no longer ruled - and the ruins of the monumental _Portico d'Ottavia._

It is said that the Jews of Rome are probably the only true Romans still left, a community living here for over 2000 years. It is also said that crying Jews followed Julius Caesar's funeral, as he had been very friendly to them.

The Roman Jews had to go into hiding after September 1943 and about one thousand were deported. Nobody knows yet if anyone survived. But, those who were not caught are back in business, as many shops on the other side of Via Arenula have reopened; at least it looks like that, even if today is Sunday. In a hole in the wall eatery they serve _filetti di baccalà, _deep fried cod fillets that is, a local Jewish delicacy. Bella absolutely wants to try them, so she has an early dinner sitting on a bench outside. She was educated strictly, as manners go, no eating in the street for her, but now she can do as she pleases and lick her fingers when she has finished.

We go back, circling the Synagogue. She would like to visit it when it is open; apparently it was not harmed during the war, despite the persecutions. We decide to end our day going over the _Isola Tiberina_, a tiny island in the Tiber.

As we walk over the ancient Roman bridge, we feel as we are leaving modern Rome behind. Once we have crossed, all noises seem to have abated but for the cries of the swifts, high over our heads. The fierce, pretty birds are happily out for their hunting till there is some light left. With darkness, bats will follow.

We circle the islet, marveling at its history and all the relics of the past it contains, while hosting at the same time a modern hospital. We are now walking along its right side, the bank covered in wild, untamed vegetation. Obviously nobody has bothered to curb the overgrowth during the war years. There are no people around, so we take the opportunity to exchange tender kisses. Apparently, it is forbidden by law to kiss in public but, it is tolerated, in cinemas for instance, and here it looks so normal, so far from our reality, two _innamorati_ strolling together, showing affection before getting back to their homes, their families and their supper. I am leaning on the wall circling the building above us, while she has her head on my chest, eyes closed, when I see them.

A couple is coming toward us from the same side we just walked over, and they are not exactly two _innamorati_. He is an Aussie corporal, and the girl with him looks like a streetwalker, with her heavy make-up, skimpy dress and high platform sandals. They slip inside the high bushes. This is going to be unpleasant, because, while concealed from above and from the river's left bank over the water, they are quite visible from our position; there is even some light falling on them from one of the hospital windows. On the contrary, we are in the shadows behind bushes and they have not noticed us yet.

The corporal's thoughts are loud and simple. He has negotiated a blowjob and wants it now. Gross. Well, gross under the circumstances but, if it is not mercenary and it is your love that is honoring you so, it is not gross, it brings you to heaven… Still, I want to save Bella from a very embarrassing situation.

"Love," I say, "I think we should go away fast, we have company," she, turns and sees the couple, while I freeze.

**Lost for a minute in a very vivid memory, I haven't paid attention to the woman's mind. But now I catch it and I see … blood, blood and thirst. Simultaneously I realize that I can hear only one heartbeat. Christ, she is not a whore, not even a woman, she is a predator a minute away from her kill. She is a vampire**.

Chapter endnotes

A cliffy, I am sorry. Will this encounter have an effect on Edward and Bella? What do you think will happen? Please tell me, or review anyway.

_Camionetta_ ride. During and immediately after the war, the Roman public transport system was sorely disrupted. Only tramways were erratically working. Human creativity took over and private trucks, with a tarpaulin on top and a mobile ladder to get in and out, roamed the city's streets, with a number indicating the bus route they were replicating. A _camionetta_ did not move until it was full, though, and it was a very bumpy ride. They were still in use many years later, well into the '70s, but only during the frequent public transport strikes, So I had the dubious pleasure to ride one, once or twice. Trade Unions were really pissed off about it, of course, and eventually this alternative service stopped completely.

Captain Blood is a 1935 film, shown in Italy later, but just before the war. During the war, however, all American films disappeared from the screens and when it ended, as my aunt tells me, some of them were made available again to the public. By the way, it is not a vampires' story, it is a pirates' story.

Till the '60s it was possible to get into a cinema at all times and stay in as long as you wanted, until the theater closed around midnight. Popcorn was unknown then, we had salted pumpkin seeds and mini ice creams and most people smoked like chimneys. Some theatres had a sliding top opening, so air could be changed during the intermission. When eventually smoking was forbidden, all smokers were very angry. I have forsaken cigarettes some years ago; just as well, because now smoking is forbidden everywhere and the rule is respected. Surprisingly so, in a not very law abiding country!

**Portico d'Ottavia **Built by Quinto Cecilio Metello in 146 B.C., this columned passage was rebuilt by Augustus in honor of his sister Octavia in 23 B.C.

**Of the over one thousand Jews deported from Rome to Auschwitz****only 16 survived. All in all, 22% of the Italian Jewish population was killed in concentration camps.**


	31. Chapter 31 Reality Check

**The Parachutist, by Camilla10**

Chapter 31 Reality check

The vampire has not sensed us yet, oblivious of everything but her feeding. Her thoughts are a jumble of Italian and, is it possible? I think it is Latin. How old is she?

I am paralyzed by indecision. Should I try to stop her and save the soldier? Can I fight another vampire with Bella present? No, too dangerous and… do I want to stop her?

Too late. She slaps the man slightly, he collapses and she is over him. Now she is drinking and I cannot stop her even if I wanted to. He would be changed, if he does not die. For sure, the world does not need another newborn.

The predator raises her head, her mouth bloodied, and finally sees us. Thirst abated, her senses are functioning well again. She looks at me, listens, inhales and knows that I am like her. And that I have a human with me. My kill, she thinks. Bella does not move, but her heart is drumming desperately.

The vampire wonders fleetingly if she wants to wrestle my prey from me but, even before I take a protective stance, she decides that I am stronger than her. So she pulls the dead soldier's body to the river's brink and kicks it into the Tiber's yellow waters.

_A thing, just a thing to her. __A piece of garbage to dispose of._ Then she dives in and disappears.

Less than five minutes and a lifetime have passed. Bella has seen a vampire in action …. She finally understands what a vampire does, what a vampire is. Before it was theoretical, but now she knows. The weight of reality cannot be denied any longer.

All is silence, the swifts have long gone. I am waiting for my death sentence; I know that it is coming.

"Edward, please, let us go home," she says, and we start walking. No words are exchanged. I don't touch her and she doesn't touch me. The monster.

Once we are in our apartment, she goes to the bathroom. I hear her retching. Then, pale as a ghost, she is back in our room and starts collecting things and throwing them in her smaller suitcase. Her face is a mask, her body rigid. I know that she is fighting hard to keep her composure, lest she collapses.

When she has finished packing she looks at me. "Edward," she says, "I… I need to be alone for a while, I need to think. I'll find myself a hotel. Please don't follow me. If you love me, let me be. I'll come back. I promise that when I am ready we will speak, but I can't do it now. Forgive me."

She is calling for a taxi. And then she goes away, closing the door softly behind her.

I slid down to the floor. I have lost her, I know I have. I relive the minutes that have destroyed me. I could not have fought the vampire - that is a fact. It was dangerous for Bella and the Aussie corporal would have seen me. But even if it had been possible… I would not have done it. The female was of my species and she was simply doing what I was doing, not so many months ago. She was following her nature, like a lioness would. Did she deserve to die for that? I had pitied her, not hated her while she was going about her business…

I muse about her eternal life, hunt and kill, hunt and kill, in all probability regularly impersonating whores as centuries went by, since it was quite a safe and easy way to find prey.

Had I not met Carlisle, to tell me that another world was possible, where would I be now?

Where I am anyway, in hell. Fool, fool to believe I could be saved, fool to believe that the months of incredible happiness I had with Bella could go on forever. Even allowing myself to hope that we were meant to be together for the eternity. Fool. Almost accepting that she could become like me, selfish bastard that I am. She had no idea, obviously, but now she has.

OK, the intermission is over, she can go back to life. She is human, she can move on. She will go to the university, she'll meet someone, she'll marry, have children…and then, one day, she will die.

Now my future is a black hole, what will I do, how can I survive an eternity without her?

I won't.

I am suffocating here, I need to be outside.

I leave the flat, my mind a turmoil of despair. Yes, I am a vampire, so let me be a vampire. I consider whom I am going to kill first. The idea of drinking human blood is appealing - it is not a taste I'll ever forget, and to have my throat completely soothed .. - but that of killing, not so much. Walking along the river again I stop to take off my ring… I'll throw it into the Tiber and I'll be free.

I am about to do it, when my hands fists around it so hard that it is almost painful. I take calming breaths and finally I put the ring on my finger again. No, I made my promise well before I got Bella back and I was right. I will not drink from humans, I will not. Nobody should die because my love has left me. It is just what I deserve, since I am an aberration…

…And because I am, I will kill something. I start running.

……..****……..

Naked and covered in blood I plunge into the sea. I found my way back to the Castelporziano reserve, a very close place to go hunting coming from Rome. I killed and drained like I was possessed, I drank much more that I needed and then I worked like a machine to bury the carcasses, some of them so mauled that it would have been difficult to say what kind of animal it had been. This night the neat eater I have strived to become has gone completely, substituted by a furious ogre, whose only redeeming factor was that he satisfied himself with deer and boars, not men.

Among the gentle Mediterranean waves I get clean and then I go on, sometimes swimming, sometimes floating underwater. Oh why, why can't I drown? It would be such a pleasant way out, and I could finally have peace. What is happening to me must be the delayed punishment for the wrong decision I took when I was here last. I had been shown that I could exist without guilt, but I choose differently, in arrogance and greed. Not a soldier, a monster. How many men did I drain before I took Egon? That many of them deserved to die doesn't absolve me. I was not an officer, not a noble guerrilla fighter, I was a loathsome predator taking lives for pleasure, not for justice.

I found again the love of my life and I thought that my repentance had been accepted, if somewhere there was a supreme being paying attention to me. But, vampires surely belong to hell. Or, more probably, there is no God anywhere and everything is just a sick joke.

I return again to the beach, find the clothes I had discarded before hunting and go back to Rome, not even running now. What's the hurry?

I stay in the empty apartment, waiting. She promised to come back. She is brave, so she will tell me that she is leaving me. I wonder how I'll react then, Can I take it like a man, a man for the last time, without visibly crumbling, without raging, making it easy for her? I must. It will be for the best, she deserves a life; she has suffered so much, so many losses, and now this.

What can I offer her? What can I do for her that would help? When we were discussing our future she told me that she didn't want to live in Italy anymore, ever. Italians had killed her parents. Some Jews were thinking of immigrating to Palestine joining the others already there, to give reality to the Zionist dream and finally create a Jewish state, but she said she would not want to go. She had the feeling that such a choice, a legitimate and courageous one, was not for her. Bella was sure that the new state would never be at peace, too many controversial issues would torment it, too many enemies would fight it. She wanted to live in peace and forget about war. _Plus,_ she had laughed, _Middle East would be too sunny for you._

Moving to the United States would therefore be a good option. But, the only way for her to get in at the moment, is if she is married to an American, just like we were planning before my world collapsed.

So maybe I will propose that she does marry me, just a formality, and no obligations, only for the time needed to get there. Then, a quiet divorce and she will be rid of me forever.

I will disappear from her life, she will not see me anymore but, I'll protect her, unseen. I promise this to myself. I'll see her married to another, I'll see her have the children I cannot give her and, one day, I'll see her die.

The pain is so much that I cannot stand it. I retreat somewhere in my mind, an empty heart of darkness, devoid of hope and of absolution.

Monday

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Tuesday

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Wednesday

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The telephone is ringing, ringing ……

I do not manage to get to it, the first time. After 10 minutes the phone rings again and I take it.

Carlisle.

"Edward, I have Bella's emancipation papers released from Court. Prof. Modanesi was so kind to bring them to me. I am wrapping up everything here and will be in Rome tomorrow evening. Hello, Edward, are you there?"

"Yes," I whisper.

"Why are you … did something happen?"

"Not by phone, please, see you tomorrow," I interrupt, disconnecting.

_Yes, something happened, dear Carlisle, the woman I love has rightly decided that she loathes vampires. She has finally regained her senses and understood what an abomination we are. We make her retch. Therefore, she will not marry me anymore, or, if she does, it will be only to get a visa for the US, in case she actually wants to go there. Then I'll let her divorce me. On grounds of extreme cruelty on my part, I suppose._

Chapter end notes

Well OK, I did a little reverse New Moon stunt, above. Only, it is days, not months. New Moon (the book) almost killed me, and I will not submit you to it.

But, has Edward read Bella's reaction correctly? Or self hate and guilt are confusing him? What was it that made her retch? It will be explained soon. In the meanwhile, please don't leave me without reviews…


	32. Chapter 32 Bella's blood

**The Parachutist, by Camilla10**

Chapter 32 Bella's blood

No, it can't be said by phone that Bella has realized that vampires are an abomination, that she is going to leave me.

I sit again on the floor and wait for another night to pass.

It is afternoon when I hear somebody climbing the stairs. It is a step I would recognize among thousands. I am standing but, I have to lean on the wall in front of the door.

Pale, distraught, red eyed, Bella must not have slept a wink since she left. And yet, she is the most beautiful woman in the world.

"_Ciao _Edward. " Her voice is slightly raspy. How much has she cried? Did she even remember to eat?

"There is… there is something I must do," she says, "I need to go to the kitchen."

I follow her slowly. She is taking something from a drawer. A filleting knife. Everything is in slow motion, I can't fathom what she wants to do with it and, before I can stop her, she has cut a long gash on her left hand's palm. Blood is sprouting from the wound. She runs to me and puts her bleeding hand on my mouth.

"Taste this Edward, taste my blood and show me. Show me if a vampire can control his thirst."

_Christ. Her-blood-in-my-mouth-on-my-tongue- how-can-I-not-taste- drink-how………_

I am kneeling, so weak that I can't stand. But, I have not killed her. I have not even attacked her.

I did taste it, and it was divine, the sweetest blood I ever had; the scent of Bella, enhanced tenfold. But, while the incredible joy of it made my body spasm, while I tingled all over for the pleasure I felt, I did not act on it, and not due to the ring I wear. The raging fire in my throat did not overwhelm me.

Yes, instinct took over, but it was not the instinct to feed, it was the instinct to protect. She was not my prey; she was my mate, so I protected her from myself. I gulped down the scorching venom pooling in my mouth, cleaned the rest of the blood from her hand and arm and licked the wound, sealing it. Then my legs gave way; a precious vampire specimen indeed. I practically collapsed.

I rise up, exhaling. I have not been breathing for a while.

"Bella, why? I don't understand. I could have killed you…"

"I needed to know," she answers, "I needed to know if it was possible, even in the most trying circumstances… Oh Edward, I was so afraid that I could become… like that one."

Finally it dawns on me. She had fled not for the horror of what I am, but of what she could become. While the universe re-aligns itself, I take her in my arms and go to sit with her on the sofa.

"Bella, Bella, how can you be so reckless? What if you had died due to your little… experiment?"

"It was the only way, love, don't you see? I cannot live without you, but I cannot become a killer. I don't want to drink human blood, ever. So if it was impossible for you to resist the call… and the… experiment ended with my death, I would have welcomed it. Now I know that you, at least, can resist what is natural for a vampire. When I am one…"

Her breath catches but, she has not finished. Suddenly letting her self-control go, crying, almost screaming, she clutches my shirt.

"When I am one… promise me, promise me, Edward, that you will kill me before I kill somebody!"

_How ridiculous. Never_, I think, but she wants an answer, an answer I am not prepared to give,

"You see," she insists, her tears choking her, making her speak in short bursts. "You were changed against your will, so you really weren't responsible for…what you did. But I am **choosing** to become a vampire… so if I do kill somebody, I will be… fully responsible… of all the evil… I cannot fail, not even once…"

I cradle her, I kiss away her tears. I am awed by the beautiful soul of this woman, trying to tackle an impossible problem on her own, wanting an eternity with me, but afraid that the price is too high in ethical terms. She does not believe that there are different species, with different rules. Evidently she believes that there are only persons, whatever they are, and they can and should make their choices according to a code of behavior that is universal and applies to everybody who has free will and a reasoning mind.

Had I had just a miniscule fragment of her moral strength, I would not have done the horrible things I have done. So maybe there is a God, and He has sent Bella to me so that I can follow her lead and be saved.

"Bella, listen to me. You are not going into this alone. I will help you step by step, when and if you really will be ready for the change. I am sure that there are things that can be done to make sure you do not endanger anybody. Carlisle is coming down from Bologna this evening, let's speak with him."

Slowly, slowly she relaxes in my arms, her head resting where my silent heart is. After a while, she falls asleep, totally spent.

When I feel that she is in a deep slumber I put her to bed, very carefully lest she wakes up. I want to speak with Carlisle alone, when he arrives.

I open the door for him when I sense his worried mind, we sit down and then we speak in the fast and almost silent way that is typical of our nature, when we don't want to be overheard. For me is quite new, I never had the need to use it before.

I tell him what happened, and the crisis that Bella and I experienced after meeting an ancient vampire on the Tiber Island.

Carlisle's thoughts are… reverent, and he expresses them sincerely.

"Edward, the woman you are bringing into my family as your mate and your wife is special. You both are, but she, she will bring us to a different level of understanding of what we are and what we can become, despite our nature. I miss Alice… she could see. Well, we will be reunited soon. Now the first thing to do is to ease her fears."

It is early morning when I hear Bella stirring. I dart downstairs to buy a couple of _maritozzi_, sweet buns filled with whipped cream, for her breakfast. Then I hasten to make coffee for her. I have finally mastered the use of the _napoletana_ coffee maker and, should some scalding water leak from it, it would not hurt me anyway. Carlisle is observing me, quite amused.

Bella joins us, smiles and is very happy with her breakfast. Taking her spoon she scrapes some cream from a _maritozzo_ and dips it in her coffee cup before eating it. She gives a little moan of pleasure and I feel a pang of distress, thinking that one day those small delights will be denied to her.

When she has finished eating we adjourn to the living room and Carlisle tells her that, to assist with her change, the family will move to a very secluded place in Alaska, the Mount McKinley National Park, where they have simple but convenient accommodations. In the Park there is a lot of big game for hunting and human presence is practically nonexistent. There she would be able to spend her time as a newborn vampire without risks.

"But, before that," he adds "I would like for you to live for a while with my family as a human, hoping that the Volturi will not discover you. I want you to see that it is possible to be a vampire and not be a killer. It is not only me and now Edward, you see, the rest of my family does the same. It is true, some of them had moments of weakness, but it has been a long time since they have.

As Bella wants to say something, he prevents her.

"Yes, they did not choose to be changed and you are choosing it. I understand the moral problem here. But, just because of this, I have the feeling that to abstain will be easier for you than it has been for them. You will know what to expect."

In his mind I see a scientist's curiosity, to discover how it will be when the change happens to somebody who is aware that it is coming.

"And, finally, he concludes, "I want you to see that we are happy together, that we actually have fun. And I want you to wait until you are absolutely sure, until you have no fears or regrets left."

He has told Bella exactly what I would have said to her. My new father is a great man.

And I too am looking forth to have fun in the company of likeminded creatures. I never had brothers or sisters.

….***….

A very sick war veteran, face covered in gauze, leaning on crutches, is marrying a very beautiful woman. The bride wears a powder blue linen suit that was her mother's, with a white shirt under it, a wartime shirt made with parachute silk. She carries a bouquet of white roses that the groom went to the flower market to buy, at five in the morning, when the sun was not yet out. The couple has the two required witnesses. One is a Consulate's employee, face impassive, but really anguished by such a gorgeous bride getting a wreck for a husband. Plus, the other witness is terrifying, she thinks, a military doctor with an awfully scarred face. Has the girl an attraction for monsters?

_Yes, she definitely has._

They pronounce the simple lines of their vows, exchange the rings and it is done. The couple thanks the Vice Consul, shakes hands with him and the employee – _ugh, he has very cold hands _– leaves the Consulate and starts walking down Via Veneto.

_Bella. Mine. Forever._

Chapter endnotes

The story could end here but, surely the time has come to give the floor to Bella. Differently from Edward, we'll be able to hear her silent mind in the next chapter …

Oh please, review.

Denali national Park and Preserve was not called as such until 1980.

And the bakery made _maritozzi_ practically don't exist anymore, no cafe offers them. Pity.


	33. Chapter 33 Oxymoron

**The Parachutist, by Camilla10**

Chapter notes

Happy Easter, if you celebrate it.

**This is the final chapter of The Parachutist. **In it we have both Edward and Bella's POVs.

**Their story, however, is not finished** but, the war has ended and Edward is back in America with this bride. How will be their life with the Cullens, when will it be the right moment for Bella's transformation? Will they face new dangers? **I intend to address these issues in a sequel**, which I'll start posting as soon as I have an adequate number of chapters. I think I need a couple of months or so. It will be different, less historical, and lighter, but I hope you will like it. The title will be **Parachutist 2 – The New World**. America is certainly a new world for Bella, but also for Edward, who is coming back to his homeland as a vampire, so everything he will experience now will be different from what he remembers from his past.

Please, to be sure not to miss it, put me among your favorite authors. In the meanwhile I plan to post here some of my previous stories.

I want to thank all of you who read and reviewed. You made me very happy. A thousand thanks to Stefanie who was my perfect editor, to Serendipitous who helped me in this endeavor and to all the people, in Europe and in the US, who gave me much needed input.

And, finally, have a look at the notes at the bottom. I want to dedicate this story…

Chapter 33 Oxymoron

Edward

We are leaving Shannon for the longest leg of our journey. Ireland was already the second stop, the next will be Newfoundland and then, finally, New York. The plane needs refueling often. At the Urbe airport in Rome Bella mailed a post card, directed to Piera Morelli. It simply said that she had found me again, we had married and she was going to America with me. She wanted her to know this, before disappearing completely from her life.

With Professor Modanesi we had to be more devious, as he would have probably wanted to see Bella married. However, in Rome I had to look a very sick man, particularly when I was in the American Consulate, and he had seen me in perfectly good shape, as far as vampires go, so it would have been strange. The solution was Bella calling him, telling him that we had found a very convenient Pan Am flight leaving quite soon, so we had decided to be married right away, no time for him to get free from his many commitments and come down from Bologna. We would be leaving for New York the day after our marriage. It took a long telephone call and many promises to write and even call him from America, as soon as we were settled.

We are airborne and can finally relax in our comfortable first class seats. A hot meal is served. Bella says it is very good, and then eats something from my untouched tray, so that the hostess is not concerned. Now the lights have been dimmed and I would like her to get some sleep. She rests her head on my shoulder, but stays awake. What is she thinking while the plane carries her away from everything she knows? Her silent mind gives me no answers.

Bella

_No, I am not sleeping. He knows, but sees that I am peaceful, relaxed, so he too relaxes. My memory wanders to the night after we married, a few days ago. And, in my mind, I am back there._

"_This is the first night of forever," he says. True, my body is not yet a forever body, but he has given himself to me and I have given myself to him for eternity. _

_Tonight we play games. He is my prisoner, arms over his head, making believe he is bound. Of course no chain exists that I could restrain him with, so I need none, only his willingness to play with me. I ask him to be still, like when, at the beginning, sometimes he asked me not to move because he was afraid of losing control if I did._

_Perfect beauty, perfect contradiction. Bronze hair that I like to run my hands through until he purrs, hair that will never grow, that can't be cut. The face of an angel, high, clear brow, topaz eyes fringed by long lashes, lids like black and lilac butterflies on his cheeks, now that they are closed, as I requested. Eyes that become pitch black when thirst, lust or wrath take him. I have seen it all. I have seen the face of the angel and the face of the vampire. And I am bound to both._

_Straight nose, square jaw_. _Full, sensuous mouth, vivid on his pale skin. A tongue too talented for me to hold on my sanity … Cool, honeyed breath, a function he does not need. Lips that ask to be kissed or can kiss me into never never land. Cold lips that conceal a lethal weapon, a weapon that has killed many times, almost killed me once, and one day will make me his equal. Lips that_ _hum to me softly, until I relax and sleep. He will never sleep again._

_Unlined, white neck, where a barely visible scar glistens whiter. A scar I always kiss, because when I do it his pleasure is great. The scar that made him what he is. The scar on a throat that always, __**always**__ burns at least a little, because he is denying himself what his body craves most, human blood. One day I will have a scar mirroring his, and my throat will burn too, a condition I accept, because it will allow for us to be eternally together._

_Forceful arms that can subjugate a big deer or a furious boar, that can carry me like I was weightless, but that can also encircle me gently, protecting me, pressing me to his chest without hurting me. Long, pale hands that can grasp a vampire's head and wrench it from his body, but know how to caress me until I am mad with desire._

_Cold fingers that first give me goose bumps and then make me so very hot. Musician's fingers, that know what music to play, that make my body sing for him. _

_A gorgeous chest, not the chest of a wrestler but of a young god, easier to be found in one of the city's museums than in this modest apartment. A chest that I like to explore at length while he trembles under my hands, tracing the sculpted muscles with a finger, covering it with kisses, sucking the nipples until they are so hard. A chest from where inhuman sounds come out: growls, roars. When I hear them, when they express his passion for me, I am undone._

_Supple and silky skin, covering the animated marble under it. A hard skin that nothing can pierce. A skin that tastes so sweet that I adore licking it. Soft body hair, almost invisible on his upper chest, becoming a dark patch under his armpits, places that, like all of him, smell wonderful, because he can't sweat. His beautiful navel, hair thickening around it, trailing downward… _

_His manhood, porcelain perfect to look at, a satin covered rod to caress, a__ rod that softens and hardens, though__. A rod that never hurts me, just brings me to another world, or allows me to do the same. Always ready again in minutes, as he is a vampire, so he could make love again and again, if only my too easily tired body would sustain it. One day, my beloved, one day… _

_Strong, athletic legs, that can run like the wind, that can crack open a sturdy freight train door, but that gently entwine with mine, when I lie down spent._

_Monster and man, killer and protector, creature of the night that becomes angelic under the sun, darkness and light, feral predator and tender lover …_

_His eyes open: _

"_Love, what are you thinking? Please tell me…"_

"_I am thinking … of oxymorons. You are everything and its contrary fused into one, you are my oxymoron, Edward and I wouldn't want it any other way." He understands me perfectly, because he asks:_

"_You wouldn't want for me to be human again, if that was possible?"_

_He deserves the truth, so I give it to him:_

"_Only because I know you would want it, not for myself." _

_Then I kiss him fiercely and his arms finally move, encircling me, drawing me to his chest and the love dance continues._

_In the darkened plane I look at his face, his bandaged face, _accidenti_. We are not sure if we will encounter the sun on transfers or landings during this trip, so it is a necessity. Please God, make it the last time he has to have it covered like this. His beautiful face. My fallen angel, my love, my husband. He owns me totally. When he had to leave me, a year and half ago, I would not have thought possible that I could love him more, desire him more. But it is so. He couldn't believe it, but I made him believe. He left as a boy and returned a man. He would laugh and say monster, not man. Wrong. As a boy he was lovely, tender and brave. And also very innocent._

_But as a man he is… overwhelming, and not innocent anymore. I too was not the same when he found me again. I had made my peace with death, I had seen everybody I loved die. At the time I did not know that the only one to die after the Militia came to the farm had been __Papà __Morelli, I thought everyone had died. And they had been killed because they had helped me. My heart despaired; I not only was accepting my death, I almost craved it. I thought that Edward had also likely died, despite my unfounded hopes and dreams, and I felt guilty that I had survived my parents. Now, I had nothing left to live for. On the train I was only angry for what these monsters, the real monsters, were doing to my people. So I prayed for an impossible reprieve just to thwart them but, if the train derailed and I died due to an accident, it would have been fine._

_And then Edward came and saved me. I saw he was different and I could not understand what had happened to him. When he told me, torn by rage, desperation and shame, I felt awed. A supernatural being who loved me still. A powerful creature changed by fate, whose instincts commanded that he killed and fed on men. But, in a small handful of months, he had dominated those instincts. In the days that followed his revelations, I understood him better. Yes, he had lost his innocence, he had fallen into the abyss, but then he had crawled out of it. By himself. Plus, he had helped others to fight a war: Italians also needed to crawl out of the abyss Mussolini had plunged them in. And he had been at their side. If I had loved Edward before, now I was prepared to do anything, anything to keep him with me. He hated himself, though, body and soul. I wanted to convince him that he was extraordinary, because he had recreated himself; he had found his way back to humanity. There is no merit in innocence, it is just a state you are born in. _

_I had changed too. In the months I spent alone I had experienced unfulfilled desires, had wondered, in case I survived and Edward did not return to me, if I would have wanted another man, just to ease the ache. I had been afraid of myself then, of my awakened sensuality which could drive me to make poor choices. In other moments I thought of death, I fantasized about it. It would be better if... My mind went in very dark places, and, if I grew, it was not as a normal girl, living a normal life, would grow. Eros and Thanatos, said the Greeks: love and death…_

_Immortal, torn, dangerous Edward is giving me what I need, he is dark enough for my inner darkness, strangely illuminating it, he is deep enough to match my inner depth. _

_As for his inhumanely beautiful body, that he hated so much… It is the most alluring thing I have ever seen. I don't think I'll ever have enough of it. I also know that now, finally, I have convinced him to accept himself._

_No mortal man would ever interest me, now. The horrors that we both experienced have bonded us irrevocably. But, to be with him I have to become like him, eventually. There is no other way. I have been promised that I'll be helped to navigate the months after my transition without murdering anybody and I want to believe that promise._

"_Bella, why are you not sleeping? Is everything OK?" _

"_Yes it is. I'll try to sleep now…."_

…_.****…._

Edward

The plane has landed. New York, La Guardia Airport. So here I am, back in America, and not alone. A married vampire, by God. It is so weird that is even hilarious. I feel Bella's excitement, she is looking everywhere, trying to take everything in.

It is late afternoon. If we are lucky the airport formalities will last long enough, so the sun will set by the time we exit the arrivals' gate. Plus, the barrage of thoughts surrounding me makes me rather uncomfortable. The Urbe airport was practically empty and during the flight it was not so bad, but now the mind noise is overpowering. In the past months I have developed some exercises to shut my mind and keep the alien thoughts in the background, and they help. The best thing, however, is to look ill, and wait awhile, not standing immediately in the queue. After all, I am still disguised as a very sick man.

"Edward, what is it? Bella asks, immediately concerned.

"Too many people thinking around me and very excited," I murmur. Let's wait." Strange, I have been in very crowded places like the stadium or the cinema, in Rome, and it was not so bad. Oh well, maybe because here almost everybody is thinking in English…That's it! I'll get used to it.

When most of the queue has passed through, we also approach the counter and show our documents. Bella's are examined for a long time, but finally it is decided that they are OK; we pass through and go to retrieve our luggage.

That done, I think that it is time for Edward Masen to regain his health. I get into a toilet and take off the bandages covering my face. The walking stick I put under my armpit. When I go back to where Bella is waiting her smile is glorious.

Pushing our carts we finally get into the arrivals hall. I spot them immediately. Three vampires are waiting for us. I was expecting it and still I stop breathing for a moment. My new family, according to Carlisle, who arranged for them to come to the airport to meet us, as he is still in Italy. I have seen them in his mind and I recognize them. The lovely woman with a sweet face and caramel colored hair is his wife Esme. The big guy with curly hair and dimples must be Emmett, and the tiny girl with black hair… is running toward us, taking my hand and Bella's in her own and almost singing to us:

"Bella, Edward, you are here at last!"

**The End**

Chapter endnotes

So, what do you think of Bella's thoughts?

As we have seen, there was a time when Bella wanted to die. It was not only despair, it was deeper than that. She felt guilty because her parents (as well as friends and relatives) had died. In fact this sense of guilt (absurd and believable at the same time) has been experienced historically by a number of Jews who survived the Holocaust. Two people come immediately to my mind as I am writing this: one is Bruno Bettelheim, a famous child psychologist, the other is the Italian writer Primo Levi (His most famous book, _Se questo è un uomo_/Survival in Auschwitz, has been described as one of the most important works of the twentieth century). They both committed suicide decades after the war, after having lived very productive lives, after having loved and been loved … and yet .. it was like the ones who had not survived, the submerged, as Levi calls them, were calling. And, at a certain point, the pull to join them could not be denied anymore. Bella will not do this, but her desire to be changed probably depends not only from her passion for Edward and the desire to be with him forever, but also, in part, from the need to become something else entirely, to cut all her ties with her past, with her nature, even. The monsters who killed her family and so many of her people were human, after all.

_Accidenti_ can be translated as damn it, or dammit.

The La Guardia airport, called previously Glenn H. Curtiss, was at the time (since 1939), called New York Municipal Airport-LaGuardia Field. It became simply La Guardia after the death of the famous mayor. I had a field day putting together this somewhat contradictory info. I hope it is right.

**Finally, I have one last thing to add: my parents and relatives told me many times of the day when Rome was liberated, much earlier than Northern Italy, and how joyful they felt. It was June 4****th****, 1944.**

**The American troops entered our city passing through Via Casilina and Porta Maggiore. It was a triumph. People cheered, girls threw flowers, kids got rides in the Jeeps. Romans were free, after 20 years of dictatorship followed by Nazi occupation. It was as if a gray leaden cloak had been lifted and everybody could breathe again. I dedicate The Parachutist to those brave, smiling American boys.**


	34. Chapter 34

The Parachutist by Camilla10

Chapter 34 – The Sequel is here!

Author's Note

Hi everybody! This is to tell you that I have finally started posting on Fanfiction net the sequel of The Parachutist, titled: **Parachutist 2 – Our New World.** Chapters 1 and 2 are already on. Here is the Summary.

_It is the summer of 1945 and the war in Europe has ended. Despite his transformation in a vampire, Edward has found his love again, has prevailed over his bloodlust and they have married. Now he is going back to America with his human bride, where they'll join Carlisle's family. How will be their life with the Cullens, when will it be the right moment for Bella's transformation? Will the Volturi discover them, will they face new dangers? As the previous one ONW is rated NC 17, as there will be sex and some violence._

I will post frequently, as the story is all written.

Finally, if you liked The Parachutist, you have still a few days to vote for it. It is up for the Shimmer Award and precisely the Adonis Award (Best Use of Edward), along with two other stories of mine:_Confession_ for the Blood Award (Best Horror/Suspense), _Eros and Psyche_ for the Pawn Award (Best Post- Breaking Dawn). Some of my favorite authors are also running: Jmolly, Raum, RedSummer and many others. http:/shimmerawards(.)blogspot(.)com/

Please note that the two chapters that comprised Carmen's story, published here as a future take, have now been removed, as they will be part of Our New World.


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